14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) open-source tool designed to help aspiring application developers create modern apps for the GNOME/GTK+ ecosystem will get a major revamp for the GNOME 3.26 desktop release.
Development of GNOME Builder 3.26 kicked off back in April with the first snapshot, and, since then, the software application received no less than five snapshots in total, which switch the tool to the Meson build system, a major change that will be implemented in all the apps from the GNOME Stack will do as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.
We closely monitored the development cycle of GNOME Builder 3.26, and we can tell you that it will be a great release adding numerous new features and improvements. It will also be the first release to receive the largest UI change since GNOME Builder's creation as the development team managed to add a large number of modifications, new and improved code, and much more.
"This release of Builder contains the largest UI change since the creation of Builder," said the developers. "As this is mid-development cycle towards GNOME 3.26, we anticipate breakage in this release. However, we value the time that people put into testing things for us and doubly so for those that file bugs. This release will almost certainly have regressions due to the nature of the redesign."
Here's what to expect from GNOME Builder 3.26
Among the biggest changes coming to GNOME Builder 3.26 this fall, we can mention new keybinding and layout engines, a listbox look and feel for the project tree, porting of the Todo plugin to C, support for multiple cursors in the text editor, JSON improvements in Flatpak plugin, new Spellcheck plugin, a redesigned build panel, as well as major global search improvements.
As for some noteworthy UI changes, it looks like the "new-document" button was replaced with a menu that supports different types of new documents, various of the document preferences like spaces, tab size or language were moved into a transient sidebar, the panel now features a "Open Pages" section, and both the spellcheck and color picker now use the new "transient sidebar."
Other than that, GNOME Builder 3.26 promises to port the beautifier plugin to the new engine, add a "primary-color" feature to the terminal for styling the document header inline with the document content, implement a "counters" window to aide in debugging, and fix dozens of bugs. The final release of GNOME Builder 3.26 will be unveiled on September 13, as part of the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.
