GNOME's Nautilus Could See Big Improvements, New Image Viewer Coming Into Focus

GNOME developer Chris Davis has laid out plans for at least some of the work items he and other open-source developers hope to accomplish for GNOME 43 and future releases.

Chris laid out some interesting plans for GNOME 43 and beyond in his latest blog post outlining features to be tackled.

On the GNOME coloring/theme front there are plans for adding support for global accent colors to Adawaita along with a recoloring API. Customizable accent colors would be similar to the feature available for other platforms and apps, though using it would be opt-in for app developers. The recoloring API would be for programmatically changing colors by developers in their apps and for the dependent colors to automatically update.

GNOME developers are working on libadwaita improvements with a recoloring API and global accent colors.

On the file management front, there is the possibility of making the file chooser become part of GNOME's core rather than part of the GTK toolkit. There are also plans to make the Nautilus file manager adaptive so it works well on mobile form factors with upstream GNOME. If the GNOME file chooser was made part of Nautilus file manager, there could be better integration with GNOME platform features.

Loupe also has been taking shape as a new image viewer for GNOME. Loupe is written in the Rust programming language and using GTK4 along with libadwaita. Loupe from the start is designed to be adaptive, touch friendly, and easy to use. In the longer-term, Loupe may add some basic image editing capabilities.

Some other talked about improvements include rewriting the Baobab disk usage analyzer within the Rust programming language and making design improvements in the process. Other work items include support for opening neighboring files within the FileChooser Portal for Flatpaks, accessibility fix-ups, and more. Great stuff planned.

More details over on blogs.gnome.org.