14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the GNOME Builder application, an open-source piece of software that lets skilled developers build the most awesome GNOME software, have announced their participation in the development cycle for GNOME 3.20.
The first milestone arrived earlier this week, and we've managed to get our hands on the internal changelog, which reveals the fact that the devs have been working hard in the last few months to implement new features in the upcoming app.
"It's been far too long since our last release, and things are heating up for GNOME 3.20. Builder has undergone a major overhaul since 3.18 and still has a few major pieces still to land this cycle," said the GNOME Builder developers.
There are numerous changes, both new things and improvements to existing functionality, in GNOME Builder 3.19.4, which is currently distributed as part of the GNOME 3.19.4 desktop environment for bleeding-edge users.
What's new in GNOME Builder 3.19.4
Among the most interesting things implemented in GNOME Builder 3.19.4, we can mention support for perspectives, thus allowing devs to group application features and plugins, a redesigned Preferences panel, and the addition of a build panel.
The plugin APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have been simplified, there are numerous Vim-mode and Vala plugin improvements, application developers can now load and unload plugins, and there's also support for external plugins.
Moreover, Builder now ships with a Todo plugin, which can be found in the track todo items, several keybindings received improvements, and there's now multi-process separation support for plugins, via IdeWorker.
Lastly, the search movements were simplified, automatic resources for CSS themes and menus.ui are provided for plugins, type definitions can be navigated using Ctrl+click, and solving of embedded dependency and plugins works as expected.
There are many other minor improvements and bugfixes implemented in this first milestone towards GNOME Builder 3.20 for the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, so we recommend checking the changelog below for more technical details.
In the meantime, you too can help test the upcoming application by downloading and compiling the GNOME Builder 3.19.4 sources. Keep in mind, though, that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.