More Fly-Pie Updates!

In the last couple of months several new versions of Fly-Pie have been released. In this post, I want to highlight the major new features.

New features were added in version 8 and version 10. The versions 9 and 11 were released as well, but they contain bug fixes only. Here are two trailers to celebrate the respective releases:

The full changelog is available on GitHub. However, the new key features are summarized here:

• Better touch support! Touch screens are now well-supported on Wayland and X11.
• Support for tablets! Pen input is now well-supported on Wayland and X11. On Wayland, multi-cursor setups should be working as well.
• Touch Buttons can now be enabled for each configured menu. A touch button is a floating button which can be moved anywhere on your screen and will open the corresponding menu when activated. In fact, you do not need to click the button, you can also start dragging on the button in a specific direction to directly enter the marking mode of the menu.
• Open menus with Super+RMB: You can now assign one of your menus to be opened when you press the right mouse button while holding down the Super key. This option then replaces the default window menu which would be opened with this combination.
• New Clipboard Menu: This menu shows recently copied things. On selection, the respective item is pasted. The menu currently supports text, raster and vector images, and files copied from the file manager. However, the clipboard is a very complex thing and there are some limitations. When the user presses Ctrl+C, the clipboard does not magically store the data, it rather registers the data provider together with a list of data formats (mime types) in which the provider could later deliver the data directly to a receiver (e.g. when the user presses Ctrl+V somewhere else). To store a history of copied things, Fly-Pie has to request the data from the current provider. However, it cannot know beforehand, in which format any receiving application would like to have the data. So it just makes some assumptions and stores the data in a quite commonly used format and hopes that the receiver will understand the format.
• A new advanced setting has been added to delay the visual appearance of Fly-Pie menus. This allows selecting items without showing the menu resulting in a less disruptive workflow for expert users.
• A new default theme has been added. The dark color scheme is supposed to blend better with the default GNOME Shell theme.
• Icons can now be decorated with a colorful background circle! Just append a -#rgb or -#rrggbb to the icon name. A circle with the given RGB color will be drawn behind the icon. This is especially useful for symbolic icons. For example, the icon go-left-symbolic will look much more interesting like this: go-left-symbolic-#49c. This works for all icon types (e.g. system icons, built-in icons, emoji or text icons).
• Fly-Pie will now attempt to open windows at the current pointer location in order to reduce mouse travel. Whenever an action is executed, Fly-Pie checks whether a window is opened within the next second. If this happens, the newly opened window is moved to the pointer.

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