Add a GUI

[Foggalong]

A few people have brought up that it would be good to have a GUI for the script. This would especially be useful for the custom folder colours since it would allow people to test things out with the gtk colour chooser. Here's a list of things I'd like to be implemented as part of the GUI:

• flag which allows the user to run the script in CLI mode
• drop down menu to pick the base style
• drop down menu to pick the colour
• custom item in colour list which will causes 1-3 new variable buttons to appear
• gtk-color-picker to choose the custom colour buttons
• preview icon (user-home.svg) which shows what current options will look like

[andia89]

I started fiddling around a little bit, but it seems that zenity is not powerful enough :( Do you have any preferences for the toolkit? (if we want to do this using bash gtkdialog would be a reasonable choice)

[Foggalong]

Yeah, that would be fine with me! :)

[andia89]

So I get that you're thinking of one big window where you can choose everything, am I right? The other way would be to have first a window for style then a window for colour etc...

[Foggalong]

Threw something together very roughly in glade to show what I was rambling on about in the op. Had the further thought that if the 3 custom boxes are always visible then people can first select a default colour (i.e. red) and the move from there if they so wish.

Clicking on any of those 3 hex boxes should launch the GTK colour picker. It'd also be nice to have small 16px previews for each Style and Color entry too but I'm not sure how to go about displaying that in the mockup

[andia89]

Cool, that should be fairly easy :)

[bilelmoussaoui]

I think that you should show others folders that use a symblo; for example : music...

[andia89]

I guess user-home is the most appropriate

[Foggalong]

Just one is fine for a preview. Ideally it'd be displayed at 64 or 96 px so substantially bigger than in my mockup

[andia89]

First try:

Now I have to connect all the signals etc...

[andia89]

I have it almost ready. Just a few quirks I have to polish :) unfortunately gtkdialog is probably the worst documented piece of software i've ever encountered :(

[Foggalong]

Worse than the GJS with GNOME Shell? D:

[andia89]

I've Never used GJS but it can't be worse :P

[Foggalong]

There literally isn't any documentation for the GJS GNOME Shell API, that's why development of Atom has been so slow. It's literally a case of trial and error for working out how to do things :'(

[satya164]

Shouldn't you be using GtkApplication instead of GtkDialog?

[andia89]

with gtkdialog I mean this: https://code.google.com/p/gtkdialog/
is reasonable because it allows bash programming

[andia89]

Ok. Although it's almost finished there are a few critical bugs I cannot iron out using gtkdialog, be it bcause there are crucial signals missing for a lot of widgets, or there are bugs in the software (as far as I understand).

This means that I cannot give that to you as is it is now, would it be ok to rewrite the whole thing using a different toolkit? (I'd love to do it using pygtk, I can also use something else) That should be fairly easy because I already have the structure and general idea

[bilelmoussaoui]

I guess that using Pygtk is a good idea ;)

[andia89]

@dirtydancing @bil-elmoussaoui @Foggalong and whoever else it may concern: I've finished the GUI and it's working pretty great, nevertheless there are probably some (presumably small) bugs. Anyone fancy to test it?

https://github.com/wa4557/numix-folders/tree/gui/gui

Just run it (for now until I added it to the the bash script) using: ./gui "5" "red" or ./gui "1" "custom" "#000000" "#000000" "#000000" (or any other combination thereof;the first number is the style, the second one the colour and the rest custom colours if there are any)

Btw: If there's a pro using GTK: I'm still trying to find out how to minimize the width of the entry boxes (that's basically the only thing I kinda dislike about this GUI)

[bilelmoussaoui]

@wa4557 worked for me, just some few things that you can fix easily

• use except & try for copyfile to handle if a file does not exists
• in the line 32 and 36 why not using color.lower() in .. instead for what you've done?

[andia89]

1. Good point, I am however still trying to think of a way to do this without copying any files on the harddisk, but keeping the svg in the memory somehow...

2. True, I'll change that

[bilelmoussaoui]

Last thing, i think you can read the config file directly using python ;) I don't know if you're going to only use the GUI or you will keep the bash script file too

[andia89]

The bash script will definitely stay :) I already have a good plan to implement this script in the bash script

[andia89]

I added the python script to the bash script. Seems to work. So if you want to test this you may also use this one :) https://github.com/wa4557/numix-folders/tree/guiconfig

[bilelmoussaoui]

Good work!! Just one thing, the icon for style 1 does not change as it should be. And there's no way to chose which style you want to use as base for the colours?

[andia89]

The symbol in style 1 is actually not a symbol but a hole in the baseplate therefore it cannot be changed. Sure there is: use the combobox and select for example "style 1"

[bilelmoussaoui]

Ah i just didn't saw that :P closing the application will anyway call the bash script :/ and i think you can add this to Gtk.entry self.colorentry2.set_max_length(7) or just make it 6 and remove the # from the Gtk.entry

[bilelmoussaoui]

One last thing, the icons colour should be updated at first start, you can try to change the icons to any custom colour, restart the application, the colours are the default ones and the icons are not..In the first start update, you can add there later a way to check for config file saved configurations.

[Foggalong]

👍

[bilelmoussaoui]

Sorry guys i'm a little bit busy, i will try to do it this weekend if possible ;)

[Foggalong]

No problem! :)

[andia89]

@bil-elmoussaoui Do you already have something? If not I might start working on this today. If yes and you have no time to finish/continue work on this you could give me what you have (pastebin) and I'll continue to work on this. Or if you really want to do this on your own I will let you do this and stop working on this

[bilelmoussaoui]

@wa4557 I'm sorry, i started school this week and i'm so busy those days too :/ Just start working on it if you want to, if i got any free time i might help you with it ;)

[andia89]

No need to apologize :) I'll start on this asap (argh so many things to fix here right now :)

[andia89]

I have it ready, which means that it works, but I'm not able to center the widgets in the first and second row, help anyone? On a second note, please test it :)
https://github.com/wa4557/numix-folders/tree/gui2

[dirtydancing]

Looking good and working smoothly 👍 , status: andia89@2c7da24

I like the current design. For your consideration, a couple of thoughts:

1. Maybe left-align the style dropdown and the colour preview boxes? Or is everything centered?

2. Alternatively, maybe left-align all rows including the folder icon preview, except for cancel/apply?

3. Maybe use a bigger folder preview icon? Then again, iirc that would be much bigger and too big?

GUI screenshot:

[andia89]

Aligning is extremeley complicated, frankly I have no idea how to do that properly :), but the idea is, that everything is centered. Left aligning somehow looks crooked, I tried that already.

As to 3) The next size is 128px (twice as big) which is arguably too big

[andia89]

Nevermind I've added a bigger preview (good call) because the next size is not 128px but 96px

[dirtydancing]

Yep, even better now 👍

Screenshot:

[andia89]

I guess this is ready to be merged then. What is still buggy is the packaging though, but that's nothing I can contribute...

[palob]

Outstanding work @wa4557 👏 . Maybe include Cancel/Apply into the title bar using a GtkHeaderBar?

For packaging I'd suggest to put a copyright/licence header at the beginning of each source file.

[Foggalong]

AFAIK @paolorotolo is the only one with permissions to edit the packaging on Launchpad and he's been busy with school and work on Glucosio. I'll see what I can do though

[andia89]

@palob Could you elaborate what you mean by that? I'm by no means an expert in gtk :)

[palob]

Something like this or this:

Edit: Or like above :)

But on a second thought maybe it's better not to make it look that GNOMEy.

[andia89]

Looks fancy :) I've never seen something like this before, I guess for now I want to keep it the way it is...

[dirtydancing]

Do we know whether header bars are currently working for all other DE/shells besides GNOME shell?

[palob]

Header bars require GTK+ 3.10 or newer(Ubuntu 14.04 or newer) and may look out of place (or even like crap with the wrong theme) outside GNOME, that's the issue I see.

[dirtydancing]

I see. Well, in that case, I would also suggest to not go for the header bars at the moment, so as to keep things simple and to ensure maximum distro/DE compatibility. They do look sweet though :-)

[Foggalong]

Headerbars are sweet when done right, but some distros are only just getting support for them. As I understand it the DE the distro is running needs to a) use gtk 3.10+ & b) have header bar support enabled. Xubuntu only got them a release ago so I'm guessing slower distros like Debian might not have them yet.

[palob]

I don't know of anything like "headerbar support" and Debian Stable is on GTK 3.14 (still supported versions oldstable on 3.4 and oldoldstable on 2.x however) but speaking of which... what's the requirements for the current GUI?

[Foggalong]

Yeah, I think it's something the window manager developers need to allow for (i.e. xfwm enabled it with the last release of Xubuntu). I'm not sure on the requirements. @wa4557?

[andia89]

I guess it should basically work with any 3.* gtk version since I've used only very basic functions. And python of course :)

[Foggalong]

With all the features having now been added I think we can close this issue, with the preview feature to be added later as per #118. Great work folks \O/

I'll get onto @paolorotolo about fixing the packaging asap :)

[paolorotolo]

Packaging fixed :)
Have fun!

[palob]

One thing just occured to me: How about extending the scope of the GUI to a general Numix GUI?
It could have buttons for e.g. downloading and installing the latest git versions (in case there isn't a daily build package for your distro) and for applying the hardcode-fixer script.

Is this any close to a good idea?

[Foggalong]

@palob In theory a good idea yeah. I'd want that developed independently of the Folders GUI for now though since I'm not exactly sure how popular such an application would be. I'd also like to get the stuff with numix-core down before launching into another big project