[LV2] Widget-less UI not working

[Hanspeter Portner]

On 28.05.2016 01:27, Stefan Riha wrote:
> I had time now to try it. I'm not sure if I understood this correctly, but ui:idleInterface and ui:showInterface don't
> seem to solve my problem. Jalv and Ardour don't even call extension_data(). They break before that, due to the invalid
> widget pointer they get from calling instantiate().

Ah, I forgot to tell that not all hosts support ui:showInterface, yet. e.g. Ardour does not.
And jalv needs to be called with a special (undocumented) flag (-s), to run in the proper state.

Although ui:showInterface is the 'official' extension to do custom UIs, some hosts only support its deprecated
predecessor extension 'external-ui' [1].

'external-ui' and ui:showInterface/ui:idleInterface are pretty similar and you can actually wrap one into the
other to support both within the same code [2].

[1] http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/ns/lv2ext/external-ui
[2] https://github.com/ventosus/customui.lv2

Have a look at [2], it should get you going, it runs fine in jalv(1.4.6), Ardour(4.7), Qtractor (0.7.5)

Run your host from the console to see whether it works for you (the UI prints some debug strings to stdout)

e.g.
$ jalv -s http://open-music-kontrollers.ch/lv2/customui#test

> However, I noticed that if I declare the widget-less UI as a ui:X11UI in the .ttl, then it works! Jalv, Ardour and
> Qtractor open an empty window, call extension_data() with ui:idleInterface. I actually think that's all I need. Probably
> has something to do with the pointer type for X11 windows (see http://lv2plug.in/ns/extensions/ui/#X11UI )

No, that's not what you need. ui:idleInterface can be used apart from ui:showInterface. It's readily used with
ui:X11UI to drive animations, screen updates, etc. as X11 has no main loop as e.g. Gtk and Qt.

If your plugin does not create an XWindow, don't declare it as ui:X11UI, if your plugin does not create a GtkWidget,
don't declare it as ui:GtkUI, ...

You're just being lucky here. Hosts expect an ui:X11UI to return an XWindow ID. The latter is just a plain Integer.
Whathever you return as a widget XWindow ID (or whathever resided in memory at that time) may just happen to
already exist in your Xwindow environment. Some hosts may not even check the retured value for validity, either.

> On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 5:08 PM, Hanspeter Portner <ventosus at airpost.net <mailto:ventosus at airpost.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On 21.05.2016 06:23, Stefan Riha wrote:
>     > Hi, I'm a beginner and experimenting with lv2.
> 
>     Great
> 
>     > I wrote a simply synth and want a UI without Widget. On the lv2 page it says
>     >
>     >  "There is no requirement that a UI actually be a graphical widget."
>     >  (from: http://lv2plug.in/ns/extensions/ui/ ).
> 
>     True, an UI can theoretically be anything.
> 
>     Can you give some more information on what you want to accomplish? You may well not need an UI in the first place (but
>     don't know yet, as you are a beginner).
> 
>     > Below that, there is a list of subclasses of UI, but all are for widgets. So I thought I'd try ui:UI directly instead of
>     > ui:GtkUI etc. But neither jalv nor Ardour recognises that there is a UI.
> 
>     ui:UI is the parent class which the Widget UIs (ui:GtkUI, ui:Gtk3UI, ui:QtUI, ...) derive from. It is en empty shell
>     really, hosts cannot possibly know what is inside, you have to give the host some more information.
> 
>     > So I used ui:GtkUI instead. In jalv, this yields error messages of type Gtk-CRITICAL. Obviously it's because there is no
>     > actual widget. In Ardour, I can see that the UI is instantiated() and immediately cleanedup(), probably because the Gtk
>     > errors are handled that way.
> 
>     If you define the UI as an ui:GtkUI, but do not return a valid GtkWidget to the host, sure this raises an error.
> 
>     > How do you do this?
>     >
>     > I looked for hours for some example code but couldn't find one. I stumbled across Ingen which has some form of
>     > web-interface (if I understood correctly) and tried to read the .ttl files, but don't understand them.
> 
>     You may be looking for ui:showInterface [1] and ui:idleInterface [2], with those you can build arbitrary
>     UIs.
> 
>     Here [3] you can find a dummy plugin I use for testing various UIs in my humble host.
>     <test_show.c> implements an as-simple-as-it-gets no-widget UI.
> 
>     [1] http://lv2plug.in/ns/extensions/ui/#showInterface
>     [2] http://lv2plug.in/ns/extensions/ui/#idleInterface
>     [3] https://github.com/ventosus/alluis.lv2
> 
>     > Thanks a lot for your help,
>     > Stefan