I actually should start doing this more... and write proper new items for www and so on, but right now I'm feeling lazy so I'm just going to squirt this out in email.
Here are some hilights from recent e development in git master. I encourage people to try these things out and see how they work for you. DDC backlight support for desktop monitors ------------------------------------------ I've done a bunch of revamping of the backlight control code. The API was decent, but... the implementation was dumb. It assumes a laptop world of a single screen only having a backlight control. No longer! Now every screen gets backlight controls. Your desktop monitors too. The idle fade stuff will work on desktop AND your internal laptop screen now. Put a backlight control gadget on a shelf on each screen and it will control THAT specific screen. How does this work? First E checks to see if X's randr system supports a backlight control for that screen. If it doesn't, it looks around at /sys/... fs nodes and if it finds something that looks backlight-like it will assume that controls the "lid screen". It will also now use libddcutil (from ddcutil) if you have it installed and dlopen that lob at runtime (no compile time dependency needed) and use libddcutil to control your monitor via i2c ... this requires the revamp i did of the setuid root tools and merging them all into one root service daemon e spawns to do these things. There are many good reasons why this needs to be this way, but it means E can not just now dim and brighten the backlight on your desktop monitors, but it can fade smoothly etc. and save power when you're not busy there... just like your laptop screen/. This should work with or without X just as the /sys fs support works without X too. This revamp makes e's backlight code a lot smarter and nicer. The ddc infra work opens up the door to providing on-screen OS driven controls for everything your monitor's on-screen menu has when you press the buttons on your screen. This allows E to even query the rotation of your monitor, set the color temperature and other color correcting controls, sharpness, contrast, the speaker volume on the monitor itself and much more. the plumbing is there and for now the ddc controller filters to ONLY allow the backlight property (0x10) to be queried and controlled. This can expand in future, but for now everything is plumbed through from back end to the backlight gadget gui and all the idle fade handling and so on works... :) Setuid helper rewrite --------------------- I merged all the functionality of the various setuid root tools e uses for things like /sys/ fs backlight control etc. into a single daemon that hangs about and e talks to via stdin/out. This reduces the number of these and has a single access point now. This has replaced everything except the eeze mount helper stuff in EFM, the new tool can replace the mounting/unmounting needs and the code is there, but the way eeze works means I can't slot it in easily. I have to rewrite the way EFM works to do this, but this is a nice "invisible cleanup" that should provide a single gateway for permissions on who can run this tool etc. and was necessary for the DDC stuff to not be glacially slow. Wallpaper generation now handles multiple resolutions ----------------------------------------------------- Before when we imported an image into our wallpaper collection (~/.e/e/backgrounds) we would run edje_cc and generate an edj file with the wallpaper encoded in it at the quality requested with the sizing info there too letting edje handle it. This way E farmed that sizing/tiling/centering or even panning off to the file itself and didn't need to store it itself - just which one you want. You can delete the original image since the import made a copy so it's a bit more reliable. The problem was, if you import some 8k photo... it will encode that full resolution image in the edj file and E will have to load all of it then upload all of it to a texture and so on at runtime... Now I fixed this to have an import tool (bonus - you can run the tool by hand too to import/generate wallpaper edj files for your collection), and it will generate multiple resolution versions of the wallpaper (smaller resolution ones, not higher), so if you mindlessly import that 8k photo.. E will generate 6k, 5k, 4k, 3k, 2k, and so on resolutions for a bunch of common resolutions and it will encode them all in the edj file so now it will use edje to choose the resolution that is most appropriate (closest to what you want - same res or a a little higher) and then at runtime E will not load the 8k one all the time. it'll load the one that best fits, thus speedup up startup time etc. Screenshot revamp with built in mini-inkscape-like diagram editor and cropper ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have totally redone the shot module in almost every way. It now supports explicit actions to delay by a given amount (e.g 500ms or 8000ms). It interactively allows you to click "delay" to delay by an amount (slider the slider up and down) to take another shot in that amount of time later... so you can shot menus and similar things. It still supports saving and sharing via e.org's screenshot service, but now E won't hang when it saves - it uses a slave process to do this so E keeps working smoothly. Saving of shots has moved to ~/.e/e/shots and always places shots there as files. if you choose to save it will automatically show that dir in efm after it's saved so you can immediately dnd it out to some target app (e.g. that mail you are writing). But best of all ... when it shoots it shows you a zoomable/scrollable preview which by default you can just click on any screen or window and cycle through which window, screen or window with padding around it you want cropped, showing you the crop area. You can also free-draw the crop rect just witch click-and-drag ... and you can modify the crop region by clicking the handles in the corners and dragging them around. Not only this... You can now draw text boxes and type in notes./text on the screenshot. You can draw arrows and lines, little e logos, square "surround" boxes or ellipses, even speech bubbles with text (the only legitimate use of comic sans font... which is what is used here :) ), thought clouds with text, and even some comic "KABOOOOOM" labels, some pointy fingers to point at things, a Monty Python foot to stomp on bits of your screenshot ... and even Malloc makes an appearance with 2 Malloc tools to draw cute cats on your screenshot for good measure (as a kind-fo easter egg). Malloc is awesome. You shall accept his new found fluffiness in your WM! :) Not only can you draw these things and size them as you like, you can alter the sizing later (unlike Gimp - more like Inkscape) and alter their 2 colors (fg/bg) and choose from a palette of colors provided or use the HSVA sliders. You can delete these doodle objects if you don't like them and just click on them in move/modify mode to raise them to the front, and you can also rotate them freely if you click on their center multiple times to toggle between move/resize mode and rotate mode. When you hit save or share exactly what you see and selected to crop is saved or uploaded with all your doodles there. The crop is done at save time so the crop region can be modified at any time and will be applied then. Jus about the only things shot doesn't do now is offer you the ability to print (who the hell prints screenshots these days?) and it won't make you a sandwich. Sorry. E's shot module/tool is now full "batteries included" awesome++. Enjoy it. Crash alert dialog improvement ----------------------------- The crash alert dialog now is a blast from the past. It's an Amiga-like guru meditation along with the same Amiga bitmap font and blinking red outline at the top of your screen. For those of you with fond memories of your Amigas... I give you some nostalgia. I also made this crash work for Wayland mode now too (it didn't before due to e holding KMS hostage while it was hung in crash mode). In the process of this I made E's restart handling require enlightenment_start to make it work as now e_start uses E's exit codes to know what to do (restart, exit cleanly etc.). This also reduces fd leaks from one e execution to another since before for restarts E just exec()'d itself. Music control ------------- This will now actually run your selected music program if you click on it and it's not there. :) Polkit support -------------- E now has a polkit helper to ask for your password should any tool ask polkit to authenticate... So E will pop up the password dialog for you etc. - no extra polkit helper daemon needs to hang around and no external modules needed. It's built in to e (well it's a module that comes with E). Startup smoothening and pre-caching ---------------------------------- E now pre-caches data it thinks it'll need (has a background thread go page in data from disk like your theme and wallpaper). This is done in the background in a thread while the rest of E keeps running along starting up. This will also smooth out the initial startup fade in as data will already be precached thus not causing stalls. I've seen this visibly improve E's smoothness on start on my Rpi's. Fixes / workarounds ------------------- So many to mention, I won't mention them all, but one is a workaround X's bad habit of allowing the pointer to exit the screen area with multiple screens of different resolution. I added some code to ecore_x to support setting pointer barriers and make E enforce them now to disallow the pointer leaving the screen area. Lots of other fixes for little things here and there too which I'm not going to get into due to the sheer volume of them. -- ------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" -------------- Carsten Haitzler - ras...@rasterman.com _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
