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.