Migrating from libglade to GtkBuilder

Since version 2.12, GTK+ provides GtkBuilder to construct user interfaces from XML descriptions, similar to the functionality provided by GladeXML in the libglade library.

A good way to start a migration from libglade to GtkBuilder is using glade3 to convert your .glade file. If your code uses the root parameter of glade_xml_new(), you can use gtk_builder_add_objects_from_file() to construct only certain objects from a GtkBuilder file.

Alternatively, GTK+ also offers the gtk-builder-convert script you can use to do the conversion; in which case you should be careful to inspect the output and make sure you didn't lose any data.

Table 1. Step-by-step instructions for porting code from libglade to GtkBuilder

libglade	GtkBuilder
#include <glade/glade.h>	not needed
GladeXML*	GtkBuilder*
glade_xml_new (FILE, "first_widget", NULL)	GError* error = NULL; GtkBuilder* builder = gtk_builder_new (); if (!gtk_builder_add_from_file (builder, FILE, &error)) { g_warning ("Couldn't load builder file: %s", error->message); g_error_free (error); }
glade_xml_get_widget (gxml, “widget_name”)	GTK_WIDGET (gtk_builder_get_object (builder, “widget_name”))
glade_get_widget_name (widget)	gtk_widget_get_name (widget)
glade_xml_get_widget_prefix (gxml, “prefix”)	can be emulated by `gtk_builder_get_objects (builder)` together with manual filtering. It returns a GSList* instead of a GList* though.

While GtkBuilder strives to be a complete replacement for libglade, there are a number of areas where it is currently still behind libglade:

GtkBuilder supports context information in translatable properties in a slightly different way than libglade. Intltool does support this since version 0.41.1.
While libglade can often tolerate multiple widgets having the same id in a glade file, GtkBuilder will not accept duplicate object ids. Both gtk-builder-convert and the GtkBuilder parser emit warnings when they see duplicate ids.