GNOME Builder 43 Alpha Released After Being Ported To GTK 4

[Scellow]

Is this for iOS? looks like a nice mobile app

I wonder how a desktop version of this app could look like

I can finally code on my phone 😍

[veeableful]

It will. GNOME 43 is my release to port Builder, 44 is when I finish writing the UI designer.

Oh thanks for the hard work! I'm looking forward to it.

[uid313]

Happy to take suggestions on wording for how I could clear this up for newcomers.

Take a look a the create a new project dialog in Visual Studio, each item has a nice text describes the project template and what it provides.



Also I am confused if "GNOME Application" template will only run on GNOME while the "GTK Application" is cross-platform?
Or if both is cross-platform. I am not sure why anyone would want to pick "GTK Application" instead of "GNOME Application".

Not completely.

We never install to Flatpak unless you click "Export". What is happening is that there isn't really a good way to integrate Cargo into any external build tooling. So it's a bit of a kludge to do meson+Cargo. Some of it was improved in GNOME 42 though to avoid double building debug/release. If it's been a while, you might have a better experience now.

Maybe it would be possible to ditch Meson for Rust projects and rely only on Cargo?
I guess this would also increase compatibility with IDE because now I can only run my app from with GNOME Builder, I have been enable to run it from VS Code, I guess VS Code don't know about Meson.

It just provides information via rust-analyzer. It can do refactoring/rename/etc though and has support for code actions. We probably need to make it more discoverable.

Thankfully the GTK 4 port will make that a lot easier now that I've written the GTK 4 version of GtkTextView, GtkSourceView, and major portions of the GL renderer. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve for the future.

I didn't know about this, I hadn't discovered that.
I want like in VS Code where you get a light bulb in the gutter of the text editor and when you click on the light bulb, it lets you do contextual actions that are relevant to that line.

[elduderino]

I've used it in very limited capacity, but one thing that stood out to me is listing files on the left vertically instead of using tabs like every other program. It makes it so annoying.

I always said from the beginning of the project I'm not doing tabs until we can do it with GtkStack and a tabstrip widget. Well with GTK 4 we can basically do that, so here ya go. I'm a man of my word

[elduderino]

My IDE of choice, looking forward for this big new release. Took me a while to adopt my workflow to it, though. Especially using `ctrl`+`.` for global search.

It will be control+space in this release, becuase ibus took our damn keybinding and now it is hijacked before we ever get key press events.

[elduderino]

Maybe GNOME Builder is great for Vala?

Our primary language is C, so that is where it shines most. But when developing an IDE for extensibility, there are never clear abstractions that fit everything. So making things just right out of the box is quite a bit of work, which I do my best on.

The difference is that "GNOME Application" is GTK 4 with Adwaita and "GTK Application" is GTK 4 without Adwaita.

Happy to take suggestions on wording for how I could clear this up for newcomers.

Every time I want to run the application it first has to compile the package with Rust then package it with Flatpak, so it is a really slow process.

Not completely.

We never install to Flatpak unless you click "Export". What is happening is that there isn't really a good way to integrate Cargo into any external build tooling. So it's a bit of a kludge to do meson+Cargo. Some of it was improved in GNOME 42 though to avoid double building debug/release. If it's been a while, you might have a better experience now.

GNOME Builder is not as helpful as VS Code it doesn't integrate Clippy or provide any refactoring help.

It just provides information via rust-analyzer. It can do refactoring/rename/etc though and has support for code actions. We probably need to make it more discoverable.

Thankfully the GTK 4 port will make that a lot easier now that I've written the GTK 4 version of GtkTextView, GtkSourceView, and major portions of the GL renderer. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve for the future.

But creating an entire IDE is a huge undertaking, IDE like Visual Studio, VS Code, Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, etc are built by large teams.

The last IDE I contributed a portion of my life on turned into Visual Studio for Mac; we'll get there in time.

[elduderino]

Well, doesn't build for me

You need a newer libgit2-glib.

[elduderino]

I wonder if the UI designer will be updated to support GTK4 as well.

It will. GNOME 43 is my release to port Builder, 44 is when I finish writing the UI designer.

[mirmirmir]

I've used it in very limited capacity, but one thing that stood out to me is listing files on the left vertically instead of using tabs like every other program. It makes it so annoying.

Its been fixed on this alpha, I think

[veeableful]

I wonder if the UI designer will be updated to support GTK4 as well. I just started learning GTK4 and used its designer to edit .ui files but encountered errors that seem to be caused by it targeting GTK3. Excited for the release when it finally hits stable!