A number of new features have landed in GTK+ recently. These are now available in the 3.15.0 release. Here is a quick look at some of them.

Overlay scrolling

We’ve had long-standing feature requests to turn scrollbars into overlayed indicators, for touch systems. An implementation of this idea has been merged now. We show traditional scrollbars when a mouse is detected, otherwise we fade in narrow, translucent indicators. The indicators are rendered on top of the content and don’t take up extra space. When you move the pointer over the indicator, it turns into a full-width scrollbar that can be used as such.

Other new scrolling-related features are support for synchronized scrolling of multiple scrolled windows with a shared scrollbar (like in the meld side-by-side view), and an ::edge-overshot signal that is generated when the user ‘overshoots’ the scrolling at either end.

OpenGL support

This is another very old request – GtkGLExt and GtkGLArea have been around for more than a decade. In 3.16, GTK+ will come with a GtkGLArea widget.

Alex’ commit message explains all the details, but the high-level summary is that we now render with OpenGL when we have to, and we can fully control the stacking of pieces that are rendered with OpenGL or with cairo: You can have a translucent popup over a 3D scene, or mix buttons into your 3D views.

While it is nice to have a GLArea widget, the real purpose is to prepare GDK for Emmanuele’s scene graph work, GSK.

A Sidebar widget

Ikey Doherty contributed the GtkSidebar widget. It is a nice and clean widget to turn the pages of a GtkStack.

IPP Printing

The GTK+ print dialog can now handle IPP printers which don’t provide a PPD to describe their capabilities.

Pure CSS theming

For the last few years, we’ve implemented more and more CSS functionality in the GTK+ style code. In 3.14, we were able to turn Adwaita into a pure CSS theme. Since CSS has clear semantics that don’t include ‘call out to arbitrary drawing code’, we are not loading and using theme engines anymore.

We’ve landed this change early in 3.15 to give theme authors enough time to convert their themes to CSS.

More to come

With these features, we are about halfway through our plans for 3.16. You can look at the GTK+ roadmap to see what else we hope to achieve in the next few months.