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. Also available at: https://github.com/aliguori/qemu/tree/gtk.5 --- v1 -> v2 - Add internationalization support. I don't actually speak any other languages so I added a placeholder for a German translation. This can be tested with LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 qemu-system-x86_64 - Fixed the terminal size for VteTerminal widgets. I think the behavior makes sense now. - Fixed lots of issues raised in review comments (see individual patches) v2 -> v3 - Various fixes and rebase - An Italian translation from Paolo - Significantly refactored resizing since v2 Known Issues: - I haven't added backwards compatibility code for older VteTerminal widgets yet. I'm okay with committing this before adding this compatibility as it's easy to disable.
