Noticed that when I build this it ends up with direct linking against a half-dozen libraries it doesn't actually use, at least on Ubuntu. Fixed it by replacing the linking commands with this:

    exe_mod.linkSystemLibrary("gtk-4", .{ .use_pkg_config = .no });
    exe_mod.linkSystemLibrary("gobject-2.0", .{});

When building on Ubuntu 26.04, the binary no longer directly links against lib{pango, cairo, pangocairo, cairo-gobject, harfbuzz, gdk_pixbuf, graphene, gio, vulkan}.

Can't create an account on the site so I figured I'd post this here. If you're going for absolute minimalism this seems like another step in the right direction for anyone building on a more 'gratuitous' GTK build (such as Ubuntu's)

Whenever someone writes "with hand-written bindings" I read "will stop working 8 minutes after the next release"

• pseudony

  today at 7:29 PM

  There are tools to generate bindings. They probably meant it as a marker of quality.

  And in languages like zig or odin which are quite similar to C in many ways, writing bindings to C code really isn’t bad. It is so easy that I decided to write my own bindings in Odin to sqlite - bindings exist but it really was so very easy that I didn’t want to bring in a generator or another dependency.

Nice, I just use lxqt-openssh-askpass, but I am on X11. A lighter alternative (for single-text input) would be FLTK. Version 1.4 is really nice, with Wayland support, and they even draw custom window decorations on GNOME. Both Cairo and FLTK should be able to compile with -X; not sure, though, about the status of the Zig bindings.

• zem

  today at 6:39 PM

  fltk is c++ based which makes language bindings significantly harder in general. gtk is c based which worked out really well in that aspect.

  • gen2brain

    today at 6:50 PM

    Sure, you need to wrap it in C, but there is also `cfltk` that is maintained and used in Rust bindings. Btw., the difference in memory usage is huge with GTK4. FLTK hello world is ~10M, GTK3 is ~15M, GTK4 is 40M! With Cairo rendering, it's about 30M, but still a lot.

    • zem

      today at 8:25 PM

      ah neat, I wasn't aware that cfltk was already used by rust.

I wrap `pinentry` (which is in the dependency trees of gnupg, pacman, gvfs, udisks2 and other software that you can de-facto depend on on desktops) inside my own simple askpass.

  $ cat ~/scripts/pinentry-askpass
  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  
  pinentry <<INPUT | grep '^D ' | cut -c 3-
  SETPROMPT Password:
  GETPIN
  INPUT

  $ cat ~/.bashrc | grep ASKPASS
  export SUDO_ASKPASS="$HOME/scripts/pinentry-askpass"
  export SSH_ASKPASS="$SUDO_ASKPASS"

It's also useful for agents to use sudo, you can write in instructions to tool-call `sudo -A` and you get a GUI popup to enter the password, and the agent continues from there. And since the "prompt" in pinentry can be customised... you can get the agent to set up a temporary askpass, which replaces "Password:" in the prompt with questions like "Can I delete this old log file in /var?" and you enter your password to authorise.

These implementations really need to also include fingerprint sensor support

• quotemstr

  today at 4:43 PM

  PAM really needs to be ravamped and support for (among other things) running multiple stacks in par@llel added. This way you could ask for a password OR a fingerprint

  • hparadiz

    today at 6:33 PM

    Keypassxc does it perfectly.

    • quotemstr

      today at 6:45 PM

      Everyone doing parallel biometric and password authentication on Linux today is either running two PAM stacks in parallel (which is meta-policy that kind of defeats the purpose of PAM) or just bypassing PAM entirely.

• xnickb

  today at 5:44 PM

  Fingerprint is an authentication mechanism, not an authorization one.

  • hparadiz

    today at 6:30 PM

    It's both.

Love the tab title shenanigans when switching to and from the tab.

Would love to see more projects using gtk and zig. Always nice to have another language option.

this is realy good and helpfull information thanks.