On March 26, we announced the release of the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, and we unveiled its awesome features, including updated and new applications. However, we completely missed one app: GNOME Builder, a powerful IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for GNOME.

Softpedia reviewed the GNOME Builder app a while ago, when the first development release towards version 3.16 was announced, immediately after the project was successfully crowdfunded on Indiegogo. The app promises to become a powerful IDE for aspiring developers who want to easily create software for the acclaimed GNOME desktop environment.

“It is my distinct pleasure to announce the first preview release of GNOME Builder!” was stated in the release notes for GNOME Builder 3.16. “I'd like to thank the Gedit and GtkSourceView team for all of their hard work integrating features from Builder upstream as well as adding features we needed. Additionally the GLib and Gtk+ teams were incredibly helpful to keep us moving.”

The Preview of GNOME Builder 3.16 brings awesome features to developers

While the GNOME Builder application is considered an alpha product, the Preview release introduced in GNOME 3.16 brings a long list of attractive features for developers, among which we can mention live diagnostics as you type for several programming languages, including C++, C, Vala, Python, Go, JavaScript, Ruby, JSON, and CSS.

In addition, the software includes robust auto-indenters for Python, XML, and GNU C89, a beautiful new GtkSourceView-based theme and corresponding integrated source editor, neat Emacs and Vim emulation, support for multiple views (vertical and horizontal splits) in a single file, support for source code highlighting, and support for style modelines from Vim, Emacs, and Kate editors.

Among the other interesting features that have been included in GNOME Builder 3.16, we can mention editorconfig support, type ahead search, Markdown and HTML live previews, dynamic power management support for laptops, scripting for JavaScript, Python, CPython, and GObject Introspection, autosaving of modified buffers, as well as Vim's scrolloffset implementation.

Download GNOME Builder 3.16 right now from Softpedia.