Remove empty caption from user interface (noui, gui) #34276

maflcko commented at 5:34 PM on January 13, 2026: member

Currently, the user interface (noui, gui) has a caption for each message. However, the caption has many issues:

It is always hard-coded to the empty string.
This is confusing and tedious when reading or maintaining the code.
It is redundant, because noui will ignore the caption and set the logging prefix (error, warning, info) based on the style.
The gui does prefer to set the title based on the caption, but since it the caption is always empty, the fallback will always be used.

Fix all issues by removing it.

refactor: Remove trailing semicolon after ADD_SIGNALS_DECL_WRAPPER

This is redundant and inconsistent, because call-sites are expected to
add the semicolon, which they all do.

eeee1e341f

refactor: [gui] Use lambdas over std::bind

This refactor makes the code easier to read and maintain.

fa0195499c

DrahtBot renamed this:
~~Remove empty caption from ThreadSafeMessageBox~~
Remove empty caption from ThreadSafeMessageBox
on Jan 13, 2026

DrahtBot commented at 5:35 PM on January 13, 2026: contributor

The following sections might be updated with supplementary metadata relevant to reviewers and maintainers.

Code Coverage & Benchmarks

For details see: https://corecheck.dev/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls/34276.

Reviews

See the guideline for information on the review process.

Type	Reviewers
ACK	hebasto, sedited

If your review is incorrectly listed, please copy-paste <code></code> into the comment that the bot should ignore.

Conflicts

Reviewers, this pull request conflicts with the following ones:

#34373 (refactor: Remove remaining std::bind, check via clang-tidy by maflcko)
#34132 (refactor: inline CCoinsViewErrorCatcher into CCoinsViewDB by l0rinc)

If you consider this pull request important, please also help to review the conflicting pull requests. Ideally, start with the one that should be merged first.

maflcko renamed this:
~~Remove empty caption from ThreadSafeMessageBox~~
Remove empty caption from user interface (noui, gui)
on Jan 13, 2026

maflcko added the label Utils/log/libs on Jan 13, 2026

maflcko added the label interfaces on Jan 13, 2026

hebasto commented at 5:59 PM on January 13, 2026: member

Does this PR introduce any visual changes in the GUI?

maflcko commented at 6:04 PM on January 13, 2026: member

Does this PR introduce any visual changes in the GUI?

No, see the pull request description.

refactor: Remove empty caption from ThreadSafeQuestion

There is only one call-site, which provided an empty caption.

Note that noui_ThreadSafeQuestionRedirect is test-only and currently
entrirely unused, so the logging format string change is not a behavior
change.

This refactor does not change any behavior.

fa8d0088e7

refactor: Remove empty caption from ThreadSafeMessageBox

The caption was empty for all call-sites, so this refactor does not
change any behavior.

Note that noui_ThreadSafeMessageBoxRedirect is test-only, so no end-user
behavior is changed here.

fafe71b743

refactor: [gui] Document that the title is always empty for node message

This refactor does not change any behavior.

fa8ebeb332

noui: Remove always empty caption while formatting

The only behavior change is in noui_ThreadSafeQuestion, which can not
detect a style and will log a strCaption=": ".

Fix this by removing it.

fad7bd9ba3

maflcko force-pushed on Jan 14, 2026

maflcko commented at 6:41 PM on January 14, 2026: member

To clarify that everything is a refactor, except for the one-line bugfix, I've extracted it as the last commit.

You can also use this to check that the GUI pop-up looks identical before and after: ./bld-cmake/bin/bitcoin-qt -regtest -datadir=/tmp -printtoconsole=0 -mocktime=123456789 (start twice)

hebasto commented at 4:17 PM on January 16, 2026: member

Concept ACK.

hebasto approved

hebasto commented at 5:04 PM on January 16, 2026: member

ACK fad7bd9ba3eef03fcdd7cb17011ea0c6e483c767, I have reviewed the code and it looks OK. Tested on Ubuntu 25.10.

sedited approved

sedited commented at 12:31 PM on January 28, 2026: contributor

ACK fad7bd9ba3eef03fcdd7cb17011ea0c6e483c767

sedited merged this on Jan 28, 2026

sedited closed this on Jan 28, 2026

maflcko deleted the branch on Jan 28, 2026

in src/noui.cpp:42 in fad7bd9ba3

  38 | @@ -39,7 +39,6 @@ bool noui_ThreadSafeMessageBox(const bilingual_str& message, unsigned int style)
  39 |          if (!fSecure) LogInfo("%s\n", message.original);
  40 |          break;
  41 |      default:
  42 | -        strCaption = ": "; // caption is always empty TODO fix this
  43 |          if (!fSecure) LogInfo("%s%s\n", strCaption, message.original);

maflcko commented at 1:12 PM on January 28, 2026:

just for reference, there is another "silent bug" here: BTN_MASK should be unset in noui. However, this seems like the wrong fix, because it seems like a layer violation for qt code (QMessageBox) to leak into the bitcoin core node.

most of the code is dead anyway, so maybe i'll remove it