A new gutter for Builder

The GtkSourceView library has this handy concept of a GtkSourceGutterRenderer. They are similar in concept to a GtkCellRenderer but for the gutter to the left or right of the text editor.

Like a GtkCellRenderer, you pack it into a container and they are placed one after another with some amount of optional spacing in-between. This is convenient because you can start quickly by mixing and matching what you need from existing components. Those include text (such as line numbers), pixbuf rendering, or even code folding regions.

However, there is a cost to this sort of composition. One is function call overhead, but that isn’t particularly interesting to me because there are ways to amortize that away (like we did with the pixel cache). The real problem is one of physical space. Each time a renderer is added, the width of the gutter is increased.

Builder 3.26.0 added a new column for breakpoints, and so we increased our width by another 18 pixels or so. Enough to be cumbersome. It looked like the following which has 4 renderers displayed.

  • Breakpoints renderer
  • Diagnostics renderer
  • Line numbers
  • Line changes (git)

Once you reach some level of complexity, you need to bite the bullet and implement a single renderer that has all the features you want in one place. It allows you to overlap content for density and use the background itself as a component. We just did that for Builder and here is what it looks like.

There are a couple other nice points performance-wise by implementing the gutter as a single renderer. We can take a number of “shortcuts” in the render path that a generic renderer cannot without sacrificing flexibility. Since the gutter is not pixel cached, this has improved the performance of kinetic scrolling on various HiDPI displays. There is always more performance work to do, but I’m rather happy with the result so far.

You’ll find this in the upcoming 3.26.1 release of Builder and is already available in Builder’s Nightly flatpak.

Builder 3.26 has landed

We’ve updated our Wiki page to give people discovering our application more insight into what Builder can do. You can check it out at wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder.

Furthermore, you’ll see prominently links to download either our Stable (now 3.26) or Nightly (3.27) builds via Flatpak.

We have also continued to fill in gaps in Builder’s documentation. If Builder is missing a plugin to do something you need, it’s high time you started writing it. 😉

We want plugins upstream for the same reason the Linux kernel does. It helps us ship better software and avoid breaking API you use.

Builder 3.26 Sightings

We’re getting close to 3.26 and a number of features have landed. Let’s take a quick screenshot tour to see what you’re likely to see in 3.26.

Most of us have seen the new visual design by now

Visual refresh

A modest debugger

A debugger for Builder

Integrated Symbol Search by GSoC student Anoop Chandu

symbol search

Inline Documentation by GSoC student Lucie Charvát

Inline documentation

Word Completion based on distance from cursor by GSoC student Umang Jain

word completion

I expect the word completion to gain some fancy features like following #include files and custom sort ordering which will look and feel similar to Vim users.