Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 14, 2026 21:33 UTC (Wed) by NHO (subscriber, #104320)
In reply to: Maybe a hint? by wtarreau
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

I am not a very good programmer, with no GTK experience, but I tried to port a GTK 3 program, pqiv image viewer, (well, it has compile time chooser for GTK 2 and GTK 3) to GTK 4.

I dropped it after spending four hours trying to find how to implement a file filter, so it won't try to open unsupported files and dispatch right formats to right backends. The filtering functionality was moved to completely different object with no comment in old place.

Documentation is horrendous and nigh-useless. It's just a bunch of functions with description of "what they do" but no examples of "how to do something". It presumes that people are already well-versed in GTK programming. And I have no idea if I implemented this correctly because, well, there's a lot of X11 code that needs to be dealt with and my enthusiasm died.

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Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 15, 2026 12:44 UTC (Thu) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (1 responses)

The GTK learning curve is quite steep. But if you know GObject well, learning GTK is easier. The GTK official tutorial don't teach you GObject though, newcomers need to figure out by themselves that they actually need (to learn) GObject.

I tried during the GTK 3 era to write a book:
https://github.com/gdev-technology/glib-gtk-learning

Nowadays I would like to finish and update the book, but it would be mostly unpaid work, so I prioritize other tasks…

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 16, 2026 19:05 UTC (Fri) by Tarnyko (subscriber, #90061) [Link]

Thanks, this is very interesting.
Although I am a sort of Glib/GTK+ "veteran", I am curious about how you phrased and organized the book.
I just grabbed it, the beginning looks promising.