Gnome Recipes

Common tasks in GNOME programs

• Allow only a single instance of a program: see GtkApplication and GApplication.

• Put an icon in the trayicon

  • See GtkStatusIcon documentation and the GtkStatusIcon tutorial. GtkStatusIcon is available since GTK 2.10.

• How to write documentation/help for a program.

• Parsing command line options: read the Goption documentation and this GOption tutorial (dead link).

• Adding a configure option to specify a directory (with a default fallback), create that directory on 'make install' and use it from our code: self-explanatory patch

• Adding support to Drag and Drop files from nautilus into your application

  • look at GTK+ drag and drop documentation.

  • see this Evince bug report .

  • see the small patch adding drag and drop to Evince.

• Brief description of how icon/mime-type association works.

• Playing a sound in GNOME, you can do it with GStreamer.

• Brief description about how kernel, udev, hal and GNOME play together for handling hotplug devices: see here and here.

Not so common tasks

• Adding a right click menu to the header of a GtkTreeView

• Simple method for loading big data without blocking your interface or using threads in this article about lazy loading. Also available: lazy loading in python

• Cancel session shutdown

Not GNOME-specific

• How to gain then drop privileges (useful for suid programs)