Introduction
For new developers, it is recommended to read the Ultimate Contributor's Guide to Xfce in order to get an impression on how to contribute to Xfce.
To request a contributor account, please
see the docs for more information.
Before getting involved with development, it may help to check
the current roadmap to get an overview of our current progress.
A guide to using Git with Xfce can be found
here.
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Communication with the Xfce development team
There are various ways to get in touch with Xfce developers:
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The
Xfce Matrix space gives an overview on all available Xfce related Matrix channels. (not yet supported by all matrix clients)
The former communication channels on IRC,
#xfce and
#xfce-dev on Libera can still be accessed, though they are not officially supported anymore.
All Xfce developers have a real life and live across multiple time zones. If you don't get an answer straight away, be patient and stay online!
AI/LLM Assisted Contribution Policy
Contributions containing material generated with the assistance of an AI/LLM (e.g., large language models, Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) are permitted only if such use is explicitly disclosed in every merge request and issue report.
The purpose of this disclosure is to assist maintainers during code review. Maintainers are exempt from this requirement, but may disclose AI/LLM usage voluntarily.
Contributors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, legality, and quality of their submissions.
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Low-quality or inappropriate AI-generated content may be rejected, and repeated violations may result in account suspension or ban.
(The following list is extracted from The Ultimate Contributor's Guide to Xfce)
Use whatever text editor/IDE you are comfortable with.
The terminal is your friend, get used to it, then you will love it.
If you want a local Docker-based build environment and build script check out the
xfce-build script and the xfce/xfce-build:latest container.
Now that almost all components are gtk3-based,
GtkInspector is an invaluable tool.
Offline documentation browser such as
Devhelp is faster and more convenient than using a web browser.
Glade is a
WYSIWYG interface editor, many Xfce components have their UI created using this editor.
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Tricky bugs will need advanced tools to find their cause, in this case
gdb and
valgrind are good companions.
Xorg’s utilities, for instance
xev and
xprop.
xfce-test is a Docker container “based on Ubuntu with a build from git sources of all core Xfce components” used for testing and development. See the
Xfce-test Quick Start Guide for basic installation instructions.
Debugging
Additional Reading