How do I develop a Gnome Toolbar Graphical Widget?

Question

I want to create a little toolbar graphical widget for Gnome. Can you point me in the right direction ? My guess is that this will not be easily done in Java, so I am looking for the next best language that I can learn up on. Specifically:

• Which language do you think has the best Gnome bindings for this sort of thing ?
• Which graphical library should I be looking at ?
• Can I implement the graphics in SVG ?
• Can I use a framework that will easily run across multiple Linux desktops ? (i.e. not just Gnome)

Thanks for any pointers !

Answer 1

If you want to write something for Gnome 3, then the best way is to write a Gnome Shell Extension, in JavaScript, using the St graphical toolkit ("St" = "Shell toolkit"). Here are links to resources:

• http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2011/04/gnome-3-shell-extensions.html
• http://blogs.openshine.com/cgtapia/2011/05/16/writing-extensions-to-the-new-gnome-shell/ (from archive.org)
• http://www.slideshare.net/yurenju/step-by-step-to-write-a-gnomeshell-extension

For LXDE, here is a guide to writing plugins for LXPanel. It looks like the only available method is using the GTK graphical toolkit in C. Note that this doesn't use Gnome libraries - as far as I can tell, LXDE libraries are in C and don't have bindings to other languages.

There is no standard for writing menu bar widgets across desktops. This is because the different desktop environments all have their own libraries and APIs. So, whether you can use SVG depends on which one you use. The RSVG library adds SVG capability to GTK, but you can use static SVG icons even without it.