Graphics stack (GUI) improvements

[Jakub Jermář]

Implement (a subset of) the following GUI improvements:

• support for direct rendering in graphic driver infrastructure
• more drawing operations in drawing library (lines, curves, polygons, circles, etc.)
• retained scene description in drawing library
• hardware acceleration of drawing library
• better quality of drawing library output (advanced filtering, antialiasing)
• better precision of drawing library output (floating point coordinates and pixels)
• support for more image and font formats in drawing library
• more widgets in widget toolkit (menu bars, scrolls bars, edit boxes, list boxes, etc.)
• support to minimize and maximize windows
• desktop environment (task bar, icons)
• improvements of terminal emulator (resizing, scrolling, history)
• console applications awareness of resizing and termination of their terminal emulator

Details

HelenOS features a compositing GUI described in Petr Koupy's master thesis (see below). The GUI is fairly basic and offers vast room for improvements (see above). The goal of this project is to implement a reasonable subset of the above features.

What Gains and Benefits will this bring?

HelenOS will become more user-friendly and visually appealing.

Difficulty

medium

Required skills

A successful applicant will have good skills of programming in the C language and the ability to survive in a non-standard non-POSIX environment. Previous experience with a graphics stack implementation would be beneficial.

Documentation

• ​Graphics Stack for HelenOS
• GUI's Users Guide

Possible mentors

HelenOS Core Team, Martin Decky