libgtkflow/README.md

GtkFlow

Here you see libgtkflow, a universal library for drawing flow graphs with Gtk+ 3.

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 ↑

The newest stuff in libgtkflow's development ↑ Nodes can be deleted by clicking the X-button in the upper right corner. Nodes are resizable by drag-n-dropping the lower right corner. The types of the docks can be printed along with their names

This is a screenshot of libgtkflow rendered with the evopop Gtk3 theme ↑

This here is the included advanced calculator demo application ↑

Flow graphs are a possibility to let your user model flows of data from, through and into several stations.

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

Consider the API unstable for now. You will encounter bugs.

Building

Make sure you get the following Dependencies:

• libgtk-3-dev
• gobject-introspection
• 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

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.