Month: July 2016

Builder Happenings

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started implementing Run support for Builder. This is somewhat tricky business since we care about complicated manners. Everything from autotools support to profiler/debugger integration to flatpak and jhbuild runtime support. Each of these complicates and contorts the problem in various directions.

Discovering the “target binary” in your project via autotools is no easy task. We have a few clever tricks but more are needed. One thing we don’t support yet is discovering bin_SCRIPTS. So launching targets like python or gjs applications is not ready yet. Once we discover .desktop files that should start working. Pretty much any other build system would be easier to implement this.

So much work behind the scenes for a cute little button.

Screenshot from 2016-07-17 22-09-21

While running, you can click stop to kill the spawned application’s process group.

Screenshot from 2016-07-17 22-10-38

But that is not all that is going on. Matthew Leeds has been working on search and replace recently (as well as a whole bunch of paper cuts). That work has landed and it is looking really good!

Screenshot from 2016-07-17 22-12-45

Also exciting is that thanks to Sebastien Lafargue we have a fancy new color picker that integrated with Builder’s source editor. You can visualize colors in your source files and change them using the dropper or numerous sliders based on how you’d like to tweak the color.

Screenshot from 2016-07-17 22-11-38

I still have a bunch of things I want to land before GUADEC, so back to the hacker den for me.

Builder Designs

Thanks to the wonderful design skill of Allan, Builder got a bunch of new designs this last month. Last week, after arriving home from the Toronto hackfest, I started reshaping Builder to match.

We’ve simplified the greeter to remove an interstitial page and raise the discoverability of some of Builder’s features.

greeter

Creating a project has been simplified and we made some features more discoverable by removing the need to dive into a GtkComboBox. Clearly, we still have a bunch of templates to land for 3.22.

new-project

Cloning a project from git is functionally the same, but we give a bit more context to what is going on.

clone-project

Those that came to my talk at FOSDEM got to hear me complain about how we have a sidebar in Builder, but I didn’t like it and wanted something different going forward. Well, we finally have landed that.

The perspective selector is in the top left corner, and clicking on it will also show you some shortcuts to help you move through Builder faster. As we grow the application, we hope to provide a bunch more useful keybindings for folks. Some of this is going to require rethinking how keybindings work in modern gtk+.

perspective-selector

One thing that was relatively buried in Builder that we wanted to improve was the Build support. We want to make it easy to build your project without getting overwhelmed by panels. So we’ve introduced a new center widget in the header called the OmniBar. It provides a high-level overview of the project and information on the current build progress, if any.

omnibar

I hope to see some more iteration on this before 3.22, and possibly API to allow plugins to supplement information for the OmniBar.

Allan is still working on even more designs this cycle, so I have no doubt that 3.22 will be our best release yet.

Matthew Leeds has been working diligently on our new search and replace engine (in addition to many Vim compatibility improvements). I’m looking forward to having that land soon (and some screenshots to go with it)!