GTK+ Wishlist

This list is maintained by the design team. It is intended to provide an overview of the kind of major features and changes that we'd like to see in GTK.

Things We Want

This includes both new capabilities and things that should be easy for developers to implement.

New tab widget

The existing tab widget isn't great; we've wanted a new one for a long time.

• Design page

• Old bug

Option lists

We've had a design for combobox replacements for a long time, and Matthias had a branch for them, but did it ever land?

• Design page

• HIG page

Responsive grids

Grids where the spacing between items remains the same and the items scale to fill the space. This is technically possible with GtkFlowBox, but how easy is that to use in practice?

Easily add sub-headings and groups to grids and lists

Like:

Or, a real-life example (this is a ListBox containing FlowBoxes).

Animate all the things

Including:

• List and grid rearrangement
  • Add a list row or grid item → the other items move to make room.
  • Remove a list row or grid item → the other items move to fill the space.
• Parent/child transitions
  • Most commonly applies to lists and grids, can include things like opening a cell form a calendar or a chat message from a history
  • Child can expand/contract in place (for example in a list or grid), or an expanded view can be overlaid on top
  • The child might need to have focus when expanded; clicking outside the child would collapse the child and focus the parent
• Action icon state changes --

  • https://alexk111.github.io/SVG-Morpheus/

  • https://shapeshifter.design/

  • https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-android

Need Review

Potential wishlist items that require review.

In-app notifications

These don't currently belong to GTK. There are also a bunch of small issues and inconsistencies in the way that apps implement them. We have some old designs for a standard GTK widget, but we never 100% decided on all the details.

• Design page

Responsive design patterns

In addition to the interest in adapting GTK apps to suit mobile form factors, there are also good reasons to embrace responsive design patterns on larger devices: they enable applications to adapt to display orientation changes, they also allow windows to work well when used side-by-side.

• Header bar items that reflow into a hamburger menu

• Sidebars that retract when the window width is below a threshold. Two options here:

  • Sidebar is replaced by back button and a separate view

  • Sidebar is replaced by a menu/popover that's accessed from the header bar

Old/Redundent

Outstanding:

• widget: set toplevel-relative position style classes on widgets

• CSS: support for reverse lookup selectors

• Update print dialog design

Wontfix:

• CSS - apply text-shadow to symbolic icons

• Unable to specify CSS transition based on start and end state

Fixed:

• HeaderBars: icon buttons aren't square

• HeaderBar height issues:

  • Headerbar with a title is too high

  • HeaderBar grows taller in clocks view

  • HeaderBar is too tall

  • HeaderBars are sometimes too tall

• Popovers

• New grid widget

• CSS Progress Spinner Improvements

• GtkNotebook - allow :hover to be styled

• HeaderBars in dialogs

• Switches should indicate current state

• Allow defining an invisible resize area for GtkPaned's handle

• Vertical stack switcher

• GtkListBox - missing separator on the bottom row

• Update file chooser design

• Text selections & insertions

• Help overlay

• CSS support min-width