Am 20.02.2012 00:44, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
Hi,
I realize UIs are the third rail of QEMU development, but over the years I've
gotten a lot of feedback from users about our UI. I think everyone struggles
with the SDL interface and its lack of discoverability but it's worse than I
think most people realize for users that rely on accessibility tools.
The two pieces of feedback I've gotten the most re: accessibility are the lack
of QEMU's enablement for screen readers and the lack of configurable
accelerators.
Since we render our own terminal using a fixed sized font, we don't respect
system font settings which means we ignore if the user has configured large
print.
We also don't integrate at all with screen readers which means that for blind
users, the virtual consoles may as well not even exist.
We also don't allow any type of configuration of accelerators. For users with
limited dexterity (this is actually more common than you would think), they may
use an input device that only inputs one key at a time. Holding down two keys
at once is not possible for these users.
These are solved problems though and while we could reinvent all of this
ourselves with SDL, we would be crazy if we did. Modern toolkits, like GTK,
solve these problems.
By using GTK, we can leverage VteTerminal for screen reader integration and font
configuration. We can also use GTK's accelerator support to make accelerators
configurable (Gnome provides a global accelerator configuration interface).
I'm not attempting to make a pretty desktop virtualization UI. Maybe we'll go
there eventually but that's not what this series is about.
This is just attempting to use a richer toolkit such that we can enable basic
accessibility support. As a consequence, the UI is much more usable even for a
user without accessibility requirements so it's a win-win.
It's not quite obvious what the build dependencies are. In my case I had
to install vte-devel. Especially if we're going to make it the default,
I think configure should print a helpful warning. (In fact, SDL has the
same problem and I have answered too many questions of users that
wondered why no window appeared, not understanding that they built only
VNC).
I think the series is a good start, just some random thoughts and things
that I noticed:
* git complains about some trailing whitespace
* Half of the menu entries appears to be translated by the libraries
used. Give me something that is all German or something that is all
English. Mixed languages looks unprofessional.
* Ctrl-Alt-= as shortcut for Zoom In isn't easy to remember and only
makes some sense on a US keyboard layout.
* The monitor display size always has the same size as the VGA tab now.
That can be quite small in text mode and you can't resize any more.
* The window has a button for maximising, but it doesn't really do
anything.
* Ctrl-PgDn/PgUp does change the tab as I expected on VGA, it's ignored
by the monitor and the serial0 tabs. parallel0 segfaults on any key
press.
* When the tab bar is enables, the cursor up key in the VGA tab selects
the tab bar. It also is sent to the guest the first time, but when
the tab bar is selected, the guest doesn't get any input any more.
Makes it rather hard to use the shell history in the guest.