libgtkflow

GtkFlow

This is libgtkflow, a widely applicable library for drawing flow graphs with Gtk. (Gtk+3 and Gtk4 are supported)

Whenever you have to let your users model a process or have to display the topology of a process to your users, flow graphs are the way to go.

Downstream Status

libgflow	libgtkflow3	libgtkflow4

Screenshots

Look at these rare fancy nodes as they get acclimated to their new home in Gtk4! These majestic creatures have travelled a long time to get here. Now they frolic as they can finally relax and have a good time.

GtkFlow has been optimized to provide much nicer visual cues on the direction of connections

Sinks and Sources may now appear on the same line

We now have Sinks that can receive data from multiple sources!

A more recent screenshot showing off libgtkflow with Gtk > 3.20. It looks a bit clearer.

This is libgtkflow running inside firefox via broadway ↑

GtkFlow runs unter that strange M$-operating-system, too ↑

Motivation

I love Flowgraphs in other programs and i want to have them in my favourite UI-toolkit Gtk. I ran into some programs which implemented similar functionality but they all didn't feel or even look very Gtk-like/GNOMEy.

Possible Usages

Specific:

• Writing an UI for GStreamer
• Writing an UI for Beehive
• Replacement for the UI in Gnuradio
• Matching monitors / inputs / outputs in Pavucontrol this is actually being worked on → pulse-flow
• Writing an UI for GEGL

Unspecific:

• Video Compositing (maybe PiTiVi)

• Visualizing dependencies of objects (e.g. debian packages in apt)

• … and whatever you can think up.

Stability

Core features are implemented and work quite well. API undergoes additions from time to time. The project is not at 1.0 yet as such, API can break but we don't expect fundamental breaking changes to core features anytime soon. If we introduce additional features, we try to offer them as additional API methods rather than changing existing ones.

Building

Building for shits and giggles

Make sure you get the following Dependencies:

• libgtk-3-dev
• libgtk-4-dev
• gobject-introspection (libgirepository1.0-dev)
• meson
• vala
• (valadoc)

Then do the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/grindhold/libgtkflow
$ cd libgtkflow
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ meson ..
$ ninja
# sudo ninja install

A user of the library (thx @gavr) reported:

"I have no idea why, but on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed pkgbuild will only be able to find gtkFlow if you build it like that:"

meson _build --buildtype=release --prefix=/usr

Building for package maintainers

This repository is the source for three different binary packages that come with their own respective version numbers. You can either build and subsequently ship them all at once, as depicted in the former chapter. Alas in some distributions you want the user to be able to omit software that he doesn't really need. for this reasons you can build this repository with three different option sets in order to get the single libraries out:

library	command
gflow	meson -Denable_gtk3=false -Denable_gtk4=false ..
gtkflow3	meson -Denable_gflow=false -Denable_gtk4=false ..
gtkflow4	meson -Denable_gflow=false -Denable_gtk3=false ..

Furthermore, this repository tracks the releases of the individual library versions with tags like this: gflow_1.0.0 gtkflow4_0.1.0. You can use these to let your package point to the correct commit.

Examples

libgtkflow supports GObject-Introspection which means you can consume it in various popular languages including but not limited to: Python, Perl, Lua, JS, PHP. I compiled some examples on how to program against the library in Python in the examples-folder.

Feel free to add examples for your favorite language.

Note: If you installed the library in /usr/local, you have to export the following environment variables for the examples to work:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
export GI_TYPELIB_PATH=/usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/girepository-1.0/

Please be aware that on other architectures than amd64 you will have to change the multiarch string x86_64-linux-gnu to something else that makes sense on your machine.