I'm using Geany 1.38 in an Arch system with a LXQt DE and I would like to use the LXQt file chooser, which it's possible if the application uses [XDG desktop portal](https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.F...).
Geany is a GTK application, it is not a sandboxed application (and many things it does that are a normal part of being an IDE are not allowed in sandboxes IIUC) and so it has no need for and does not use portals.
I'm not expert about sandboxed applications, I just see that if an application supports portal with one of its implementations it works having DBus as the only dependency (no need to use flatpak/libportal), which now I see Geany doesn't have.
Geany also works on Windows and Macos and on many other DEs which don't seem to be listed as having backends [here](https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal). Also not sure if Windows and Macos do dbus even.
Therefore supporting portals would require Geany to have two builds, one using portals and one using GTK with the associated maintenance and support.
GTK4 (if Geany ever gets there) has a [native](https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.FileChooserNative.html) file chooser for Windows and Macos, but not Qt (can't think why not ;-)
Geany also works on Windows and Macos and on many other DEs which don't seem to be listed as having backends [here](https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal). Also not sure if Windows and Macos do dbus even.
Maybe I forgot the "on Linux" bit, not for use on other platforms where it could be either native (better) or just GTK 😝
Therefore supporting portals would require Geany to have two builds, one using portals and one using GTK with the associated maintenance and support.
Right, unless making portal/dbus mandatory deps on Linux/BSD, which is not the case. macOS and Windows builds can still build as usual though.
GTK4 (if Geany ever gets there) has a [native](https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.FileChooserNative.html) file chooser for Windows and Macos, but not Qt (can't think why not ;-)
That wouldn't help me as Linux user anyway, don't need a Qt implementation directly having portal, it can use any implementation using any toolkit depending on what the user wants
Closed #3458 as completed.
GTK4 (if Geany ever gets there) has a [native](https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.FileChooserNative.html) file chooser for Windows and Macos, but not Qt (can't think why not ;-)
Actually, the native file chooser is indeed for Qt if the app calling it is run on Plasma or another Qt environment. The "native file chooser" just calls out to the XDG portal. And GTK3 already has that API as well.
The main issue with native dialogs/portals, is that they have reduced feature set, see e.g. [GtkFileChooserNative](https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/class.FileChooserNative.html). And some might be a problematic trade-off for our use cases. Also note that I can't read anything in the link above about the portals being used outside of a sandboxed app, so I'm not sure if it would happen.
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