QGtkStyle made it’s way into the Qt snapshots this week, meaning it will become part of the Qt 4.5 release. Technical users can already compile and use it on their own desktop, but once Qt 4.5 is out it will simply replace Cleanlooks as the default application style Qt uses on GNOME desktops. While I haven’t blogged about it since the announcement back in May, a lot of fixes and improvements have gone into it since then and I’d like to thank everybody contributing bug reports, suggestions and patches to the project so far. Since the existing plugin based on Qt 4.4 seems rather popular and not everybody feel comfortable using an unstable version of Qt, I will continue to maintain it as a separate project and accept bug reports over at my google code page.
In other news, the nice folks over at the Qt4 Maemo garage have been adapting QGtkStyle to work nicely with the Maemo platform as was evidenced by lorn’s post last month. Samuel also blogged about using Freetype for subpixel filtering which should eventually take care of any differences in font rendering between Qt and GTK.
17 Responses to “QGtkStyle now part of Qt”
This is a great move for Qt!
Very cool. At one point long ago I was also looking into doing a “gtk-qt-engine in reverse” — basically QGtkStyle — and the obstacle I found was that Qt’s painting API was just a hell of a lot more flexible than GTK’s. Qt draws in floating point coordinates with arbitrary transformations, while GTK’s API was a very simple pixel-based one. So while it’s possible to implement a pixel-based API using a floating point one as the backend, the reverse seemed to be basically impossible. How did you solve this? Or does GTK also have a new API now?
Illissius, as far as I know, GTK now uses cairo (e.g. http://cairographics.org) which in fact does use floating point coordinates everywhere… That might explain it.
I’m ignorant but, the one on the right is GTK style, right?
SpamRocket: They are both QGtkStyle, just showing different GTK styles.
Finally! Awesome. Yes! Desktop GUI consistency.
*passes out from excitement*
Thank you!
I’m involved in development of Qt-based application and native look out-of-box on Ubuntu and company will be a huge step forward for our application. 
Thanks!
Itis great to have native look under Gnome and still use great Qt toolkit.
OMFG! This is fricking awesomeness! I really like gnome look (especially the Clearlooks and the intrepid one, the white version).
One more step toward GTK+ total deprecation.
Cheers!
I would love to some some progress on the gtk side to, so that gtk apps look good in qt/KDE out of the box, cause gtk-qt-engine is litle hackish, i.e. some apps look really ugly with it. Also it would be great if gtk-styles engines are listed in systemsettings in kde, and an configure dialog in systemsettings to install themes for them too.
Thanks for the positive comments!
illisius : As pau pointed out, Cairo is fairly comparable to QPainter these days but we are barely using the GTK painting API at all.
This is a great move forward for the all developers writing multi-platform applications. After all, some probably even prefer the look and feel of GNOME, but prefer to code using Qt!
Awesome!
One problem I noticed so far: it doesn’t force a repaint on theme change. (Also, if possible, perhaps it’s worth detecting the two gtk-qt-engines and falling back to Plastique or something, to avoid problems.)
David: Are you using the plugin or a snapshot of Qt? It is supposed to flush automatically but I know it has some issues while running on KDE at the moment. The fallback should already be handled on startup. If you are running the “Qt” theme engine it will refuse to load GTK and fall back to cleanlooks as you suggest. This doesnt work if GTK is already loaded though, so if you start out using another Gtk+ theme and change it to one of those two It would probably already be too late for me to do anything about the situation.
Hi, for a final user like me (not a developper), there is a howto to used QGtkStyle on my Ubuntu Hardy (MSI Wind) ??
Or I must wait for Intrepid Ibex ?
Cheers.
(from Burgundy)
Zaurux: you can install it from here: https://launchpad.net/~martin-espinoza/+archive Then you have to go to preferences -> qt and change the style to gtk.
Awesome! This is great for the maemo Qt developers.
QGTKStyle is very amazing!!! 