Rewrite Ulauncher preferences to use pure GTK (not webkit)

[friday]

Description

Ulauncher's preferences is a separate web app with separate dependencies. It's slower to launch, has a ton of wrapper code to maintain to add a proxy server to communicate with the app, and it's bloating up the package (most of the package size is the preferences app). It also requires a build step in a separate language/environment and with separate packages to maintain, and the Gtk4 version of the WebKit2Gtk dependency would also require migration work to make it work.

I suggest rewriting it as a libadwaita/Gtk4 app, separate from the Ulauncher app, so we use Gtk3 and Gtk4, then the rest can be migrated to Gtk4 before we release v6.

I actually started prototyping it and I think it will definitely be less work rewriting it than all the work I already spent trying to improve it.

Alternatively we can use libhandy, which is what libadwaita was called in Gtk3, but I would rather not have to rewrite it to Gtk3, then to Gtk4...

(note that there are other issues in the way for Gtk4, like using X11-exclusive APIs that are now removed by Gtk, but I have a different plan for that).

Communication guidelines

• I have read and agree with Ulauncher's communication guidelines and checked the existing feature requests before suggesting this.

Feature isn't possible to support as an extension.

• This feature request cannot satisfactory be supported as a third party extension.

Ulauncher v6

• I have checked and couldn't find my suggestion in v6.

[fgclue]

Slower to launch? It's been pretty fast for me.

[friday]

Slower to launch? It's been pretty fast for me.

That's because Ulauncher v5 never kills the preferences window. Just hides and unhides it. You're paying for it in ram instead.