Gajim’s new main window is coming together step by step while many core functionalities are being rewritten. This month also brought better accessibility for Gajim’s message input and improved Status Icon behavior.

Changes in Gajim

During March, we steadily worked on Gajim’s new main window, reimplementing feature after feature. Since these changes often lead to core functionalities being rewritten, we decided to take a step forward in many areas. For example: instead of adapting the old Contact Information window, we decided to go for the new implementation we originally planned for some time later, because it gave us more freedom regarding contact specific actions. For instance, the new Contact Information window includes group management and subscription management, which renders some of the old contact list dialogs obsolete (i.e. we don’t have to re-implement those). We’ll go into details with the coming blog posts. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, the chat message input received a focus-indicating border. You already know this from single line Entries elsewhere in Gajim: once you focus the entry, a blue border appears around it, making it obvious where the current focus is. It’s the same now for the chat message input (being a multi line Textview instead of a single line Entry). We also removed the ‘Write a message…’ placeholder, since it did not always work reliably.

Furthermore, the window behavior for Gajim’s contact list has been improved. When clicking on the status icon in you system tray while Gajim’s window resides somewhere in the background behind other windows on your desktop, it will be raised to the top (this is new). If it’s minimized to the tray, it will be restored; if it’s focused, it will be minimized (this was already the case before).

What else happened

• An issue with handling missing avatar hashes has been fixed, which would prevent Gajim from starting #10428
• A domain validation issue has been resolved #10010

Plugin updates

No plugin updates this month.

Changes in python-nbxmpp

A module for handling roster operations has been implemented and improved while working on Gajim’s new main window, which features a minimal version of Gajim’s current contact list/roster combination. While implementing the new Contact Information window, a module for XEP-0202 Entity Time has been added as well.

As always, feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.