A GTK+ 3 update

Plans

When we started development towards GTK+ 4, we laid out aplan that said GTK+ 3.22 would be the final, stable branch of GTK+ 3.  And we’ve stuck to this for a while.

I has served us reasonably well — GTK+ 3 stopped changing in drastic ways, which was well-received, and we are finally seeing applications moving from GTK+ 2.

Reality

But, GTK+ 4 is taking its time to mature (more on that in another post), and some nice new features (such as font variation support, or Emoji completion) languish unused in master. We also get requests for critical APIs from some of the ported applications.

Therefore, we have decided that it is better to change course and allow a limited amount of new features and API in GTK+ 3.x, by doing a GTK+ 3.24 release in September.

There is now a gtk-3-24 branch in git. GTK+ 3.x maintenance has moved to that branch, and we won’t be doing any further 3.22.x releases.

Highlights

The first release off this new branch is GTK+ 3.23.0, which can be found here:

https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/3.23/gtk+-3.23.0.tar.xz

The highlights of this release include new font chooser features,

• Allow setting OpenType font features
• Show examples for OpenType font features
• Allow selecting OpenType font variations
• Support levels of details for selection

new Emoji features,

• Support a completion popup for Emoji
• Drop Ctrl-Shift-e shortcut

gdk_window_move_to_rect as public API,

and the Wayland backend using anonymous shared memory on FreeBSD.

Numerology

A side-effect of doing one more 3.x cycle is that we will have GTK+ 3.24 to be the final GTK+ 3, which is a pleasant parallel to GTK+ 2.24 being the final GTK+ 2.