Draft: Qt Frontend

[Blquinn]

Description

This is an initial draft on adding Qt QWebEngine support.

Type of change

• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)

How Has This Been Tested?

• Linux (I guess theoretically any platform that Qt supports)

If you build an app with the qt tag on this branch, you should see a small window with example.org come up.

Checklist:

Since this is just a proof of concept draft, I'm holding off on this checklist for now.

• I have updated website/src/pages/changelog.mdx with details of this PR
• My code follows the general coding style of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation
• My changes generate no new warnings
• I have added tests that prove my fix is effective or that my feature works
• New and existing unit tests pass locally with my changes

[leaanthony]

This is absolute 🔥 I'm speechless 🤯

[Blquinn]

Thanks 😊 I had fun doing it!

I think things are looking pretty good as far as high level design / patterns. What do you think?

I can keep forging ahead implementing the rest of the front end functions if you think I'm headed in the right direction.

[leaanthony]

Yeah, I think that would be great. I'm keen for you to keep @tmclane across this as he has valuable experience in the linux side of Wails.

[tmclane]

I personally dislike the number of files this has to touch. But that isn't a problem with your changes it is more of a problem with the structure of the project as it currently sits. I think it would be nice if we could move common linux stuff in linux and move the webkit and qt frontend work into packages underneath linux. Could hopefully avoid having to place a !qt tag on everything. Let me experiment with that unless you want to take it on as well. Perhaps leaving it this way for v2 and we can do it better in v3 would be more appropriate.

[Blquinn]

Yea the flag situation isn't exactly ideal. Totally agree with your assessment. There's a lot of code that could and should be shared, I did a good amount of copy/paste from the Linux module. Feel free to take a stab at it!

[Blquinn]

Following up to say that I've implemented pretty much everything other than menus and multi-window. There's a couple things that aren't working, like window positioning, but I think that's just a wayland thing.

[tmclane]

Nice! I've been swamped at work and at home so haven't had any free time to look/work on this. Window placement does work in v3 using gtk under Wayland. I don't see why it wouldn't work with qt as well.

Looking forward to playing with this after I install something with kde on it.

[Blquinn]

Perhaps there is some way of getting it to work -- I'm able to resize the window using the cursor. The wayland protocol itself definitely doesn't support it directly, but rather the compositor would see https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html. Simply calling the Window's move() method doesn't work as it does on other platforms.

I also confirmed that it works on x11 by setting QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb and that gets window positioning to work.

[PylotLight]

@Blquinn How'd you go with this one? What would you say the current status is of this PR?

[tmclane]

I'll check this out this week!

[Blquinn]

@Blquinn How'd you go with this one? What would you say the current status is of this PR?

I think it's pretty far along. Things that still need to be done are:

• Menus
• Processing messages and requests from webview
• Setting window theme

I'd prefer to wait to implement the rest for an architectural review of some kind. Hopefully @tmclane can take a look this week! :)

[tmclane]

@Blquinn So I pushed up a rebased copy of your branch to this repository. I did add a single commit to the end which moved all the desktop/linux -> desktop/gtk and updated the import that used it. I also removed all of the !qt build tags that were added in that directory. Would you please pull these changes and see if it works to your satisfaction?

Near as I can tell it is as functional as it was.

https://github.com/wailsapp/wails/tree/linux-qt

[tmclane]

Jump on the Discord if you want to talk about this in real time.

[leaanthony]

Moving this to discord would absolutely be the best way forward. Use this link to join.