Neha Patil (Editor)

GNOME Builder

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Written in
  
C

Operating system
  
Linux

GNOME Builder

Initial release
  
March 24, 2015; 23 months ago (2015-03-24)

Stable release
  
3.22.3 (9 November 2016; 3 months ago (2016-11-09)) [±]

Preview release
  
3.23.91 (1 March 2017; 7 days ago (2017-03-01)) [±]

Repository
  
git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-builder/

GNOME Builder is a general purpose integrated development environment (IDE) for GNOME desktop environment. It was initially released on March 24, 2015.

Contents

Features

  • GNOME Builder has been addressing "GNOME App" developers from its inception on, and aims to integrate well with other Gnome desktop development tools.
  • It has integrated support for GNOME Devhelp is available
  • The version control system git can be used by Gnome Builder to highlight code additions and changes.
  • There is support for developing flatpak applications.
  • GNOME Builder offers syntax highlighting for many programming languages through GtkSourceView.
  • Code completion is available for the C-languages (C, C++, etc.) and Python, with additional languages under development.
  • Plugins are supported and can be written in C, Python 3, or Vala.
  • GNOME Builder has basic support for many programming languages, and will offer additional features for languages that are supported by GObject Introspection.

    • At GUADEC2016 Christian Hergert provided a demo on YouTube of an upcoming version of GNOME Builder. More features will be integrated once GTK+ Scene Graph Kit will have been merged into GTK+. sysprof was forked and its version number bumped from 1.2.0 to 3.20 and was integrated in version 3.22.

    Gnome Builder uses Gnome Code Assistance to provide code diagnostics for CSS, HTML, JS, JSON, Python, Ruby, SCSS, Shell script and XML. Jedi is used for code completion for Python. Clang is used for code assistance for the C-languages. Rust diagnostics are provided by using the Language Server Protocol to communicate with the Rust Language Server.

    User interface

    Most of the interface is dedicated to the centrally positioned code editor. The editor automatically recognizes most programming languages and will highlight the text accordingly. When a version control system is used, colored bars next to the line numbers indicate changes to those lines. For supported languages, additional symbols highlight lines that contain errors or poorly formatted code.

    Builder can switch between Builder's own, Vim and Emacs keyboard bindings.

    Around the code-editor additional panels can be toggled into view. This includes a project-tree, a terminal-window, and a help-browser. The project tree allows the user to perform file and folder operations.

    Development

    The development of GNOME Builder was crowdfunded in January 2015. The campaign reached 169% of its funding goal (55360 USD).

    Version history

  • 3.16.0: Initial release on 24 March 2015.
  • 3.16.1: This version was released on 13 April 2015 and included many improvements to the user interface, file management and syntax highlighting.
  • 3.16.2: Was released on 16 April 2015 and brought mostly bug fixes and some improvements to project management.
  • 3.16.3: Released on 18 May 2015 this update included a source-overview-map for scrolling and updates to the preference-dialogs.
  • 3.18.0: Was released with the rest of GNOME 3.18 on 23 September 2015.
  • 3.18.1 was released on 15 October 2015 and brought many improvements to Vala code completion and error-hinting. The Jedi-plugin for Python code-completion was improved as well.
  • 3.20 was released on 23 March 2016.
  • 3.20.4 was released on 6 May 2016.
  • 3.22: This version introduced preliminary support for Rust and its Gtk bindings.
  • 3.22.4: Updates to the build system and the Flatpak integration.

    • References

    GNOME Builder Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA