February 20th, 2014 — pbor

This week GNOME released its 3.11.90 version and entered the UI freeze period.

Some time ago nacho unveiled the major changes in the gedit user interface that we have been designing and implementing, but now that the dust is settling I think it is a good time to take another look at the many details we have been polishing since those early screenshots were posted.

We now use the new GtkPopover widget to select the currrent side panel and to tweak the current view settings

Many dialogs are now taking advantage of header bars

The Gtk tabs design went through more refinements and using the new support for a centered widget in GtkBox, the tab label is properly centered also when showing a warning.

The new user interface aims to be elegant and minimalistic, but this does not mean that is not thought for advanced users, quite the opposite: I think heavy keyboard users will enjoy the no-frills UI that lets you focus on the content, whether it is code, your LaTeX thesis or that tricky apache configuration.

All the usual advanced tools are still there (for instance the Snippets and External Tools dialogs can be reached from the App Menu) and by popular demand we incuded in GtkSourceView the Solarized and Solarized-dark color schemes. Not to mention the new code-assistance framework, but that’s something for another post :-)

Even if not as visible, the same amount of polish and attention to detail happened under the hood.

The use of GMenu / GAction was iterated a few times with the invaluable help of Ryan who has always been ready to answer our many questions, and I am now confident that is properly set to accomodate the need of plugins and the integration on different platforms[1]

Ryan also helped us improve the command line handling, taking advantage of (and actually driving) the new features of GApplication.

Sebastien Lafargue rewrote the document list side pane using GtkListBox and greatly improving the code and reimplemented the the fullscreen mode replacing a ton of custom animation code with GtkRevealer.

[1] help and patches are very much welcome, and I do not mean it in the usual “patches welcome” tone :-)