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