Catalog

A GTK4 GUI for univ, inspired by the Bazaar. It talks to univ the same way the built-in TUI does — by shelling out to the binary — so the store stays the single source of truth.

The UI is written against libadapta (the theme-aware libadwaita soft fork) via its adw-compat.h header, so the code uses the familiar Adw* names and would also compile against plain libadwaita unchanged.

Views

View	What it does
Home	a large auto-scrolling banner of five random featured packages plus buttons for every configured repository
Installed	list installed packages, filter them, view details, reinstall or uninstall
Browse	search the deb/rpm repo indexes and install results
Log	live output of every univ operation

The header bar has a refresh button, an upgrade-all button, and a spinner while anything is running. Package installs/uninstalls stream their output into the Log and pop a toast when done.

Building

The only hard dependency is a C++17 compiler, meson/ninja, and a GTK4 + libadapta stack. On any Ublue machine those come from Homebrew:

brew install meson ninja gtk4 glib graphene fribidi appstream json-glib sassc gettext

export PATH="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/gettext/bin:$PATH"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/lib/pkgconfig:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/share/pkgconfig:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/xorgproto/share/pkgconfig"

meson setup _build \
  -Dlibadapta:examples=false \
  -Dlibadapta:tests=false \
  -Dlibadapta:vapi=false \
  -Dlibadapta:introspection=disabled \
  -Dlibadapta:gtk_doc=false
ninja -C _build

Notes:

• Leave LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset while building. Pointing it at /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/lib makes /usr/bin/git load brew's libcurl, which breaks GitHub TLS when meson clones subprojects (unable to get local issuer certificate (20)).
• The xorgproto directory in PKG_CONFIG_PATH is required — without it meson cannot find the X protocol headers (xproto, kbproto, xextproto, ...) that GTK4's pkg-config metadata expects, and it falls back to building gtk/pango/cairo from source.
• sassc is needed to build libadapta's stylesheet.

libadapta is pulled in automatically as a meson subproject (subprojects/libadapta.wrap), pinned to the latest 1.5.x revision. If it is ever installed system-wide instead, meson picks it up via pkg-config and skips the subproject.

Running

env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/lib ./_build/catalog

LD_LIBRARY_PATH is required at runtime so the binary finds brew's GTK4. univ is resolved from $UNIV_BIN if set, otherwise from PATH.

Icons

The app bundles the Adwaita symbolic icons it uses (from adwaita-icon-theme, LGPL-3.0-or-later) as GResources, so the header bar, view switcher and package rows look right even on desktops whose icon theme lacks the GTK icon names (KDE/Breeze misses e.g. software-update-available-symbolic and view-list-symbolic, which is what made them render as fallback blobs).

The gear button in the header bar picks the icon style:

• GNOME (Adwaita) (default) — force the Adwaita icon theme
• KDE (Breeze) — use KDE's Breeze icons, with the bundled set filling the gaps
• Follow system — use whatever icon theme the desktop has set

The choice is persisted in ~/.config/catalog/config.ini ([ui] icon-style = gnome|kde|system).

Platform

Wayland-first: the app is a native Wayland client. GTK4 selects the Wayland backend automatically and falls back to X11 only if no Wayland compositor is available; this has been verified to open on GdkWaylandDisplay.

Building and installing

Dependencies: meson, ninja, GTK 4 (gtk4), json-glib. libadapta is vendored as a meson subproject and builds with introspection disabled, so no gobject-introspection is required.

Per-user install (installs to ~/.local):

meson setup _build --prefix "$HOME/.local"
ninja -C _build
meson install -C _build

System-wide install (requires root):

meson setup _build --prefix /usr --libdir lib
ninja -C _build
sudo meson install -C _build

Installed files:

• bin/catalog — the application
• share/applications/io.univ.Catalog.desktop — launcher entry (app id io.univ.Catalog, icon catalog)
• share/icons/hicolor/{16..512}x{16..512}/apps/catalog.png — app icon (the coupon logo from images/Coupon.png)
• the libadapta fallback subproject installs its own lib/theme/locale files

The desktop entry and icon are picked up by both GNOME and KDE; after a system-wide install run gtk-update-icon-cache -f /usr/share/icons/hicolor. A per-user install needs ~/.local/bin on $PATH for the Exec=catalog line to resolve.

Project layout

File	Responsibility
src/main.cpp	entry point, AdwApplication setup
src/app.cpp	window, three views, package list/details widgets, actions
src/model.cpp	Package struct + json-glib parsing of univ JSON output
src/univ.cpp	univ discovery, async queries, streaming install/uninstall tasks
meson.build	build glue, links libadapta subproject + json-glib

Roadmap

• package icons (deb control / rpm header metadata or generic by-kind icons)
• per-repository view and repo management
• dependencies graph / reverse-dependencies in the detail pane
• profile management (univ profile ...) from the GUI
• transaction rollback status surfacing from the Log