Sometimes, when software tells us about decades from moment A to moment B, we ask ourselves "how is it possible?" Sometimes it's a bug that hasn't been fixed for decades, and sometimes it's a feature that simply could have been improved in all that time. That is something that will happen in the medium term in GNOME Files, better known, at least to old Linux users, as Nautilus.
In this article are collected the changes that have taken place in GNOME, which is a desktop, applications and related libraries, in the week from April 28 to May 5. The one for Nautilus is one, but we also found more developments in Loupe, right now in the incubator and an app that is expected to be part of the official GNOME apps in the coming months.
This week in GNOME
- There is a new interface to configure the columns of the File lists. After almost 20 years with the same column selector, the discontinuation of GtkTreeView encouraged a replacement of the column selector with one with modern widgets and layout. This enhancement also allows you to change the visible columns either globally or just for the current folder, without duplicating the old tricky interface in the Preferences.
- Loupe now delivers a robust mobile experience as well, thanks to this week's update. They include news almost daily; is what you have be in the incubator. In addition to having completed the interface so that it is adaptable ("adaptive" would be the word I would use for this, but the RAE would pull my ears), some typical functions such as sliding with one finger, double tap to zoom to enlarge or zoom out or pinch gesture also for zoom and pan are now supported. This week's update includes:
- Adopted the properties view for smaller form factors using the latest libadwaita Breakpoint feature.
- Hide the HeaderBar and the full screen mouse cursor after a moment.
- Skip unsupported image formats when browsing images.
- Many more minor tweaks and fixes
- NewsFlash 2.3.0 was released yesterday. The only visible change is the new icon. Under the hood, WebKitGTK has been updated to the latest version, which should fix a lot of issues. But most of the work has gone into the new content grabber. It should be much faster than the javascript library used above. It's better documented and easier to provide custom extraction rules.
- Rust's gir binding generator is now able to embed docs for virtual methods and class methods from the corresponding GIR files.
- Bavarder has arrived this week, and it's an AI-powered chat app. With Bavarder, a question can be asked to different providers such as Hugging Chat, BAI Chat, OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo, etc. It has been designed to be minimalist in order to have access to a chatbot without the need of a browser or an account. As a personal comment, and having tried both ChatGPT and local alternatives and applications, I must say that you have to be careful with this type of service, something that the developer of Bavarder also says. If the answers of the AIs can already be inaccurate, those that give us the local or derived services can be even worse. But it can be used for all kinds of popular and not so popular wisdom questions.
- Flare 0.8.0 has been released, bringing big improvements to the message list. Instead of the previous “Load More” button, content is now dynamically loaded if needed, improving the Flare experience with longer chats. Since the last update, message deletion has also been implemented. And as always, many minor bug fixes and features have also been developed to ensure Flare works as expected.
And that has been all this week in GNOME. If you are a KDE user and you are waiting for the weekly entry, this Saturday has been discontinued because its members have things to do, like planning Plasma 6.0.
Information and content: TWIG.