Gajim 1.4.3 comes with some exciting news: Native emoji rendering on Windows! Want to customize your workspaces? Why not use emojis as well? As always, lots of bugs have been fixed in this release.
What’s New
This release is all about emojis. Gajim is based on GTK, a multi-platform framework for graphical user interfaces (GUI). For rendering text, GTK relies on Pango and underlying, on Cairo. On Windows, Cairo wasn’t able to render colored emojis.. until now! The latest Cairo release enables Gajim to render emojis in their full spectrum of colors on Windows 🎉
In consequence, we can use GTK’s native emoji chooser on Windows, and we don’t have to rely on workarounds to display emojis in chat messages. Without these workarounds, Gajim’s performance increased significantly on Windows.
While figuring out how to get enable all this on Windows, we added a nice little feature as well: You can now add emojis to workspaces!
Windows users please note: Windows builds are now based on Python 3.9, which does not run on Windows 7 or older.
Fixes and improvements
Several issues have been fixed in this release.
- AppPage: Now shows plugin update notifications
- ChatList: Middle mouse click for closing a chat has been added
- DirectorySearch: A ‘Start Chat’ menu item has been added
- Group chat roster: Visibility is now stored
- Jingle file transfer widget is now smaller
- Width of Contact Info and Group Chat Details elements have been unified
- Workspaces: Move to new workspace functionality has been added
- GStreamer is now an optional dependency again
- Windows installer has been simplified
Have a look at the changelog for the complete list.
As always, don’t hesitate to contact us at gajim@conference.gajim.org or open an issue on our Gitlab.