GTK+ Inspector is a debugging tool that is built directly into GTK+ and is available in every GTK+ application by using of the shortcuts Ctrl-Shift-d or Ctrl-Shift-i.

Since I last wrote about it, a number of things have changed, so it is time to give an update on the state of GtkInspector as of GTK+ 3.15.2.

The UI has been revamped a bit to make best use of the limited space in the inspector window. Some of our newer widgets, such as GtkStackSwitcher, GtkSidebar and GtkSearchEntry, were helpful here:

The object list has a new search implementation. It tries to deal better with search in a tree than the built-in search in GtkTreeView. Please try it and let me know what you think.

We’ve added a new feature: object statistics. This is made possible by corresponding new functionality in GLib. To enable it, run your application with

GOBJECT_DEBUG=instance-count

The inspector is now using a separate display connection. This isolates it from many of the changes that you can make in it, such as CSS tweaks:

After 3.14, we have started to integrate OpenGL rendering into GTK+. This is reflected in the inspector, which shows information about the OpenGL stack and offers some GL-related debug settings:

More recently, I’ve spent my coding time helping to make glade support all of the new GTK+ widgets and features. We are not quite there yet, but you can already use client-side decorations, GtkHeaderBar, GtkSearchBar, GtkStack, GtkStackSwitcher and GtkSidebar with glade from git master.

I hope to add a few more new widgets to this list soon. My personal goal for this effort is to use glade for all the ui files inside GTK+.