This week, GNOME They published their announcement on their usual schedule, which is Friday night in Spain, but we weren't able to report on it at the time. In any case, what they published covered what happened from February 20th to 27th, and among other things, we have new additions: Gradia and Sudoku have joined the GNOME ecosystem. They're not quite official applications yet, but they're getting close.
What follows is the list with all those new features.
This week in GNOME
- The latest merge request in Calendar introduces a coordinate-based navigation system in the monthly view. This system calculates the coordinates of relevant event widgets and finds the closest widget relative to the one currently in focus when using the arrow keys. When navigating with Tab, the focus moves chronologically, scrolling down until there are no overlapping event widgets in that specific cell; it then moves to the next higher event widget in the following cells or rows. Navigation with Shift+Tab works in the opposite direction.
- Blueprint 0.20.0 is now available. This update includes numerous features from multiple contributors. A highlight is the addition of a linter, thanks to Neighborhoodie and the STA grant. The linter detects common errors that go beyond syntax and type checking. Due to the nature of these checks, it may still have some rough edges, so reporting any areas for improvement is recommended. Also included are new autocomplete suggestions during editing, improvements to type checking in expressions, and support for newer GTK features such as Gtk.TryExpression.
- Sudoku was accepted into the circle. It's a simple and polished GNOME application for playing Sudoku.
- Gradia was accepted into the circle. It allows you to edit and annotate screenshots, draw on them, add a background, and share them.
- RustConn 0.9.3 is now available. This release cycle focused on closing the gap between "it works" and "it works exactly as expected." All open issues and feature requests from this period were resolved, and significant quality-of-life and security improvements were implemented for those working at the terminal. New features in this version include:
- Agentless remote monitoring: A MobaXterm-style bar sits below SSH, Telnet, and Kubernetes terminals, analyzes /proc/* through the existing session, and displays real-time statistics for CPU, memory, disk, and network.
- Ultra-fast navigation: A new Command Palette (Ctrl+P) incorporates VS Code-style fuzzy search for connections, tags, and commands. Full support for custom keyboard shortcuts is also added, allowing you to remap over 30 actions.
- Visual organization: allows you to manage large lists of connections with pinned favorites, custom GTK icons or emojis, and tabs colored by protocol with group indicators such as "Production" or "Staging".
- Modernized interface: eight dialogs were migrated to adw::Modern Dialog with adaptive size and screen reader support was added to the password and connection dialogs.
- Enhanced security: a complete backend overhaul. Stored credentials now use AES-256-GCM with Argon2id, and all code has been migrated to SecretString to prevent memory leaks. Full support for SSH port forwarding (-L, -R, -D) has also been added.
- Backend pass: A backend for pass (passwordstore.org) is incorporated with full GUI and CLI support.
- Internal improvements: migration to Rust 2024 edition, incorporation of intelligent protocol backup mechanisms for RDP/VNC that elegantly handle negotiation failures, and 100% translation coverage in 15 languages.
- Typesetter, Typst's minimalist, locally focused editor, receives quality-of-life improvements in version 0.11.0:
- New app icon.
- The preview now automatically adjusts to the window and screen size without needing to manually configure the PPI.
- Option to invert the brightness of the preview when using dark mode.
- Possibility to simulate different forms of color blindness in the preview to test the accessibility of the document.
- Performance improvements, including reduced memory usage.
- oo7-daemon, the server-side component of the Secret Service provider, receives a new version with KDE compatibility, allowing it to run on both GNOME and KDE.
- Custom Command Menu lets you create a custom menu for the GNOME top bar. This GNOME extension allows you to run commands directly from the top bar, launch applications, run scripts, launch shell commands, and more through a simple and intuitive interface. Version 13 introduces support for creating submenus, increases the maximum number of allowed entries, and adds support for GNOME 50. This version also includes additional translations into Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Polish.
And this has been all this week in GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.