GNUnet Messenger API: October 2025

Hi there,

this month I started to port the messenger application from GTK3 and libhandy to GTK4 and libadwaita. So far the progress looks pretty good. I still need to adjust some widgets to avoid usage of some deprecated ones. There is some logic missing to upload files because file dialogs and widgets from GTK3 using those haven’t been ported exactly. So things need to change.

Screenshot of the main window ported to GTK4

If you are interested in testing the changes so far, I have pushed all commits to a separate branch so far. While porting I have also noticed some bugs in the application and libgnunetchat API which might cause crashes or freezes. I will try to solve them before any release but I’m very confident that the next release will contain all the changes towards GTK4.

Hopefully this will help long-term with reducing CPU load in case of image file previews and video streams. Also I’d like to add in-place video previews for shared files instead of relying on the video player in a separate dialog. But this will require further changes and I will likely write about that in a separate post.

For all the UI changes so far I’ve used the newer Cambalache application instead of Glade which I used for GTK3. Overall it has been very useful. However it has crashed a ton too. I hope there will come more contributions to it in the future increasing stability because I think GTK is on a good track with such a graphical tool to design UI. Especially when developers like me aim to support mobile Linux as well.

Kind regards,
Jacki

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