GTK+ 4.0 Toolkit Development Is Warming Up

[waxhead]

I code in C and have looked at a few cross platform toolkits for GUI's. The problem is that all of them appear to be too complex.
I remember in the good old days when I was coding in AmigaE. You could use something called Ebuilder (if my memory serves me correctly) and easily construct fairly complex GUI's with pure code and keeping it visually understandable (as code) with callbacks to functions without too much fuzz.

These days it seems that feminine half-gay designer boys wearing white shirts of an expensive brand decides to screw up all that was good about a GUI by introducing new idiotic things like stupid menu symbols, ridiculous padding for borders, insanely sized fonts, tons of wasted screen space for just a ok requester and soon we will have cancel buttons with live video playback as background streamed over bluetooth via your fu*ked up cellphone.

What we need is a STANDARD compact good old GUI like GTK2 or even the standard Windows look where tab moves between objects, some rectangle shows what button is selected (for keyboard navigation) and a decent hierarchical menu and a non-fu*ked up titlebar without too much crap in it.

I think that MUI (Magic User Interface) for the Amiga did at some point allow you to have your own settings pr. application. So for example if you had a small editor you could have huge fonts and purple buttons on that , while you your compression program you could keep small fonts and standard size buttons.

In other words - all GUI applications should follow a standard design rule. If you would like to "theme" your applications you do it in the preferences for the OS with an option to override a specific application. Heck the application could even supply it's own suggested theme (but not use it unless you said so).

In fact when someone writes a GUI wrapper for ncurses I think that is all we need. text mode GUI + real GUI all in one go - that would have been something!

[TingPing]

U ever heard of Vala, bruh? elementaryOS is using it very effectively for their apps, and some GNOME apps use it as well. I used it too, its perfect, and first class citizen in GNOME Builder.

Vala is an unmaintained language, has numerous problems (including being awful to support in Builder), and is generally not promoted by Gnome contributors.

[quikee]

Vala is an unmaintained language

A quick look at Vala's git repository shows that what you said is bullshit so other points aren't even worth responding to.

[TingPing]

A quick look at Vala's git repository shows that what you said is bullshit so other points aren't even worth responding to.

Maintainer stepping down: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/vala.../msg00000.html

Discussion about future of the language: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/vala...er/thread.html

A handful of commits does not make it well maintained.

[yzsolt]

and the C++ binding sucks because it's a binding/workaround for a project written in C. If they wrote Gtk4 in Rust, C++ or anything other that is more high-level yet native (no interpreted crap like Java or Python), I'd consider moving to it. Until then, no matter what they do Qt5 is better.

Wut? gtkmm (the C++ binding) is absolutely cool, uses pure C++ wherever possible (unlike Qt and its MOC). So no, it doesn't suck. It nicely wraps the whole GObject-based ecosystem. And I've seen the Rust GTK wrapper, and in general some Rust code too, and I don't think it's any more convenient to develop an UI in Rust than it is in C++...

Oh, and Java is not interpreted, but managed. But I share your opinion about its crappiness

[ElectricPrism]

I really wish Application migration to GTK-Current would go faster. Is it still known as the Gimp Tool Kit? If so it's a bit ironic that GIMP hasn't finished porting to GTK3 yet.

Any GTK 3 guys out there reading, take a moment and please consider contributing to GIMP GTK3 Git branch, thanks

[JonathanM]

Vala is an unmaintained language

Not true, but it could use more contributors that have enough time and enough knowledge about the compilers' internals. With a maintainer stepping down, the situation has gotten worse though.

has numerous problems (including being awful to support in Builder)

It's not completely bug free and could use improvements, but the generated code has been fine for me and many others, it's not very pretty though. (If it didn't create temporary variables everywhere it would already look a lot better.)
Documentation also needs some more work and someone needs to fix valadoc.org, although http://www.valadate.org:8000 works mostly fine.
Support in Builder is also improving. (The vala plugin may not be configured correctly without intervention, though. I hope this is fixed by now.)

and is generally not promoted by Gnome contributors.

It is true that few Gnome developers use Vala.

It may not be perfect, but it's the best I know of for developing GObject/Gtk+ applications.

[plonoma]

While not any exciting changes have yet landed in Git master, this branch is prepping the removal of GTK 3.x deprecated APIs and this branch will remove the deprecated style API.

Good, removing deprecated stuff is good. Increasing the major version number is ideally suited for introducing big breaking changes.

I hardly got used to the halfassed gtk3, I hope 4 will remain backwards compatible so we dont need another paralell install

The whole point of breaking backwards compatibility is to remove design mistakes.

[uid313]

I hope GTK 4 would bring a new widget called GtkEmoji or something so that you can input emoji.
Now to insert emojis you would have to Google then find some website that lists emoji and copy and paste it from there.

GNOME should support emojis easy like Android and iOS. There should be a widget that can be inserted into a popover that can be triggered by a input/textarea or by a button.

The problem with Gtk is that writing GUI apps in C sucks:
gtk_window_set_title(GKT_WINDOW(win), "my title");
instead of
win->setTitle("my Title");

and the C++ binding sucks because it's a binding/workaround for a project written in C. If they wrote Gtk4 in Rust, C++ or anything other that is more high-level yet native (no interpreted crap like Java or Python), I'd consider moving to it. Until then, no matter what they do Qt5 is better.

The Python bindings through GI (GObject Introspection) are much nicer.

U ever heard of Vala, bruh? elementaryOS is using it very effectively for their apps, and some GNOME apps use it as well. I used it too, its perfect, and first class citizen in GNOME Builder.

Nobody uses Vala outside of GNOME.
It is ridiculous that you should have to change your language or learn a new language just for a toolkit.
I've looked at some Vala code and it looks pretty nice tho, it much cleaner and more expressive than C. It feels much more modern and a bit like C#.

You could also use Vala (which has native bindings, it compiles to C): win.set_title("my Title");
Instantiation is just: var win = new Gtk.Window ();

Yeah, but nobody uses Vala outside GNOME. Then you have to switch the language and learn a new language just to use the toolkit, that is crazy.

[JonathanM]

Yeah, but nobody uses Vala outside GNOME. Then you have to switch the language and learn a new language just to use the toolkit, that is crazy.

Elementary OS devs use it, some people working with GStreamer use it, used it to make a web framework, etc... It's a bit wider than just GNOME (and Gtk+)...
I think it is a good language and if most concepts are already familiar it doesn't take much effort to learn it.
If you don't have to invest much time into learning something new that helps you do a certain task, I don't see any issues with that. If the language would be wildly different compared to common programming languages or if you couldn't just use C libraries in a logical maner, things would be different.