Last week I received an email if Bluefish could be improved for people with a visual impairment. I never occurred to me that there would be people with limited vision wanting to use Bluefish. The most requested features in the email were:
- Zoom in/out with ctrl+ / ctrl-
- Maximum screen estate
- Better cursor visibility
The first feature was easy. Bluefish already has zoom with ctrl-mousewheel, so I added the accelerators (it turned out that the requester was not aware of this feature).
For the second feature I created an option that automatically hides all menu bars, status bars and toolbars on fullscreen (F11). It displays them again if you hit F11 again. This way basically every bit of the screen is used by the editor itself. The only issue I found is when LXDE is used. LXDE has bound F11 to the window-manager fullscreen, so the application fullscreen never gets called. I moved my code to the configure event handler, where I can detect both the internal fullscreen as well as a window manager fullscreen.
The third feature was the hardest bit. With some help from IRC I managed to make the cursor-aspect-ratio user defined.
In gtk2 it looks like this:
style "bluefish-cursor" {GtkWidget::cursor-aspect-ratio = %f }
class "GtkTextView" style "bluefish-cursor"
which is loaded with gtk_rc_parse_string()
In gtk3it is slightly nicer:
GtkTextView {-GtkWidget-cursor-aspect-ratio: %f;}
which is loaded with gtk_css_provider_load_from_data() and gtk_style_context_add_provider()
Next to a bigger cursor I made a setting to highlight the cursor position: it paints a differently coloured background on the character left and right of the cursor. I connected that to the mark-set insert-text and delete-range signals, the last two with g_signal_connect_after() to get the new location of the cursor and not the old location.
This code does have quite a performance impact: scrolling with the arrow keys is significantly slower with this option enabled. I used this code:
gtk_text_buffer_get_bounds(btv->buffer, &it1, &it2); gtk_text_buffer_remove_tag(btv->buffer, btv->cursortag, &it1, &it2); it1 = *location; it2 = it1; gtk_text_iter_backward_char(&it1); gtk_text_iter_forward_char(&it2); gtk_text_buffer_apply_tag(btv->buffer, btv->cursortag, &it1, &it2);
What this code causes is an update the internal structure of the GtkTextBuffer (probably something like a balanced tree) that keeps track where each tag starts and stops – for every cursor move. After rethinking this I remembered this is much easier done in the expose event!
get the coordinates with gtk_text_view_get_iter_location(), convert them with gtk_text_view_buffer_to_window_coords() and paint with cairo_rectangle() and cairo_fill():
gtk_text_buffer_get_iter_at_mark(buffer, &it, gtk_text_buffer_get_insert(buffer));
gtk_text_view_get_iter_location(view,&it,&itrect);
gtk_text_view_buffer_to_window_coords(view, GTK_TEXT_WINDOW_TEXT
, itrect.x, itrect.y, &x2, &y2);
cairo_rectangle(cr, (gfloat)x2-width, (gfloat)y2, (gfloat)(width*2 )
, (gfloat)itrect.height);
cairo_fill(cr);
The result is visible below. So now it is test time!
