On 2012-02-27 00:46, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> I realize UIs are the third rail of QEMU development, but over the years I've
> gotten a lot of feedback from users about our UI.  I think everyone struggles
> with the SDL interface and its lack of discoverability but it's worse than I
> think most people realize for users that rely on accessibility tools.
> 
> The two pieces of feedback I've gotten the most re: accessibility are the lack
> of QEMU's enablement for screen readers and the lack of configurable
> accelerators.
> 
> Since we render our own terminal using a fixed sized font, we don't respect
> system font settings which means we ignore if the user has configured large
> print.
> 
> We also don't integrate at all with screen readers which means that for blind
> users, the virtual consoles may as well not even exist.
> 
> We also don't allow any type of configuration of accelerators.  For users with
> limited dexterity (this is actually more common than you would think), they may
> use an input device that only inputs one key at a time.  Holding down two keys
> at once is not possible for these users.
> 
> These are solved problems though and while we could reinvent all of this
> ourselves with SDL, we would be crazy if we did.  Modern toolkits, like GTK,
> solve these problems.
> 
> By using GTK, we can leverage VteTerminal for screen reader integration and font
> configuration.  We can also use GTK's accelerator support to make accelerators
> configurable (Gnome provides a global accelerator configuration interface).
> 
> I'm not attempting to make a pretty desktop virtualization UI.  Maybe we'll go
> there eventually but that's not what this series is about.
> 
> This is just attempting to use a richer toolkit such that we can enable basic
> accessibility support.  As a consequence, the UI is much more usable even for a
> user without accessibility requirements so it's a win-win.
> 
> Also available at:
> 
> https://github.com/aliguori/qemu/tree/gtk.2
> 
> ---
> v1 -> v2
>  - Add internationalization support.  I don't actually speak any other languages
>    so I added a placeholder for a German translation.  This can be tested with
>    LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 qemu-system-x86_64
>  - Fixed the terminal size for VteTerminal widgets.  I think the behavior makes
>    sense now.
>  - Fixed lots of issues raised in review comments (see individual patches)
> 
> Known Issues:
>  - I saw the X crash once.  I think it has to do with widget sizes.  I need to
>    work harder to reproduce.
>  - I've not recreated the reported memory leak yet.
>  - I haven't added backwards compatibility code for older VteTerminal widgets
>    yet.

Looks quite nice but still has some rough edges:
- full screen doesn't work, at least here
- lacking support for auto-grabbing in absolute mouse mode
- unscaling (ctrl-alt-u) is lacking
- window not resizable (except in broken full-screen mode)

Will see if I find some time to look into this.

Is this also working properly under Windows? Otherwise we probably can't
deprecate SDL - or would have to provide a native Windows GUI.

As we have a menu now, I would suggest to add some handy monitor
commands there as well, like reset or powerdown.

Jan