Which is the best GUI designer for GTK apps?

Question

I want a visual GUI designer that will produce XML output in the format used by GtkBuilder. Glade seems to be the most powerful, although Gazpacho is more lightweight. Stetic (included with MonoDevelop) seems to be good but I don't believe it supports GtkBuilder yet.

Solution 1

The last time I tried to use Gazpacho -- admittedly, a few months ago, so it might have improved -- it was nearly unusable. Constant crashes[1], couldn't set some important widget attributes, and to top it off, its final output couldn't be loaded. I ended up just using Glade, saving to a .glade file, and converting to GtkBuilder manually. I've heard that Glade's GtkBuilder output is better in recent versions, so you might be able to skip the second and third steps.

If you decide on Glade, make sure to use Glade 3 -- it's much, much better than the older version.

[1] Yes, I know it's written in Python. No, I can't figure out how they managed to pull off such an unstable Python app.

Solution 2

Ive always used Glade, nice XML output. Though I haven't done a lot recently so perhaps there's something better now.

Comments

[quikchange]

Glade 3.6 seems to have GtkBuilder support and I've been using it with pretty good results, although it can't handle a couple of widgets (i.e. GtkComboBoxText and GtkComboBoxEntryText). I gave up on Gazpacho entirely because it doesn't handle labelled tabs in notebooks properly.

[weberc2]

In 2013, Glade works seamlessly w/ GtkBuilder, if anyone is curious.

[luizfls]

As a newcomer to GTK+, and from reading this answer: Was Glade ever meant for something other than designing GTK+ interfaces?