GTK4 Gets Smoother GPU-Accelerated Scrolling, Modern Cursor Blinking

GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success.

Happening the past few days in Portland, Oregon was the "GTK West Coast Hackfest" where Matthias Clasen, Christian Hergert, and other GNOME developers took towards figuring out effectively last minute work for GTK 4.0.

Clasen has shared that from this hackfest some of their accomplishments are better scrolling and cursor blinking. Up to now, GTK4's scrolling was done with their fall-back Cairo rendering while now has been ported to their new Pango renderer and supports GPU-accelerated scrolling. There still are optimizations to be done for this scrolling but it's already much smoother than GTK3.

Cursor blinking was also an "unexpected success" from the event. GTK had just been turning the cursor on and off, but with GTK4 they are now fading the cursor in and out smoothly. More details for those interested on Clasen's blog.