can any #gnome #gtk people out there tell me what the current state of https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/cambalache is?
more specifically, is this the main GUI designer tool that people are using atm? i understood it was the new generation of #glade since a while now
im happy to take another run at gnome desktop apps but i ideally like to keep the design separate from the code (also for collaborating with designers)
@dantescanline yeh, you can design gtk desktop apps in a GUI environment itself instead of painstakingly writing out the entire design in code
you can shoot the shit with other people and move stuff around in experiments without having to recompile a bunch of noise
it spits out a text file and the code loads it and then just references some conventions / names / etc. to pull it all together
@d1 I'm not entirely sure what you're asking; Cambalache is being developed by @xjuan for designing UIs with GTK4 and libadwaita, since Glade cannot work with GTK4. Cambalache recently got a 1.0 release: https://blogs.gnome.org/gtk/2026/03/20/cambalaches-first-major-milestone/
You don't need a GUI tool to write UI definition files separate from code: you can write XML by hand (which is, admittedly, painful but not more so than writing HTML pages); or you can use blueprint, a DSL that "compiles" to XML at build time: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/blueprint-compiler/
After more than 5 years, 1780 commits and 20k lines of handcrafted, artisanal Python code I am very pleased to announce Cambalache 1.0 !!! Cambalache is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool that allows you to create and edit user interfaces for Gtk 4 and 3 applications. Gtk provides all the...
@ebassi great, thanks for the info! i didn't know about blueprints which seem pretty fantastic.
i was more wondering if cambalache is still being developed/used by others (so i can get help), a thing people recommend etc. etc.
i didn't see the 1.0 release, looking great! will give it a shot soon
You can join Cambalache’s matrix channel at #cambalache:gnome.org
d1
D S
Victoria 🏳️⚧️
Emmanuele Bassi
Juan Pablo Ugarte
Tommi 🤯
Tobias Bernard