X Input 2 Support Goes Into GTK+ 3.0

Beyond updates to Clutter, Mutter, GNOME Shell, and various other GNOME applications, there is one very other important change that happened to the GNOME desktop this week. After being around for years, X Input 2 support was finally merged into the GTK+ library for the 3.0 release.

While X Input 2 (Xi2) was around much longer, it was officially released with X Server 1.7 in October of last year while it was merged into the mainline X.Org Server some months earlier. X Input 2.0 is a critical piece of Multi-Pointer X (MPX) support, also developed by Peter Hutterer, for handling multiple cursor inputs simultaneously.

Confirmation of X Input 2.0 support being merged into the mainline GTK+ repository can be found in this GNOME bug report. For some months prior this Xi2 support had lived in a branch of GTK+. Information on Multi-Pointer X support for GTK+ can be found on this GNOME Live Wiki page.

This support can now be found in GTK+ 2.90.1 (a GTK+ 3.0 development snapshot) that was just released over the night and this GTK+ update can be read about via its release announcement.