14 DAY TRIAL // The GTK+ developers have announced their plans for GTK+ 3.20, the next major release of the open-source and cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit used in numerous software projects and GNU/Linux operating systems.
One of the biggest changes to be seen in GIMP 3.20, which will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, due for release on March 23, 2016, is the implementation of numerous CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) features.
Matthias Clasen of the GNOME Project has written an interesting and comprehensive article on the matter, explaining why the team is making such huge changes in the GTK+ GUI toolkit.
"Oh NO! they’re breaking themes again! Which is certainly one way to look at it, but I think it misses the point a little bit - since the effort is actually meant to make life easier for anybody who wants to change the appearance of GTK+ widgets," Matthias Clasen writes.
Most widgets have been ported to CSS nodes
GTK+ 3.19.2, the second milestone in the development cycle of GTK+ 3.20, was released this weekend, porting most of the widgets to CSS nodes, documenting both the tree relationships and elements names.
As expected, the default Adwaita and HighContrast themes used in the GNOME desktop environment have been updated to support the new CSS nodes implementation, but theme developers should know that they will need to make adjustments to their custom CSS files.
Among other interesting changes added in GTK+ 3.19.2, we can mention support for displaying and manipulating CSS nodes in the Inspector, support for native file chooser on Windows OSes, as well as support for displaying direction-dependent sequences and shortcuts of keys in the GtkShortcutsWindow widget.
Moreover, the interface requirements of the GtkFileChooser widget have been changed to GObject, allowing the implementations of non-widget filechoosers, and the ":focus-on-click" class has been moved to GtkWidget, making it available to all widgets. Last but not least, size allocations have been greatly simplified.
Those of you who want to install the latest development release of GTK+ can download the GTK+ 3.19.2 sources right now from Softpedia and start compiling by hand. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.