Migrating from libglade to GtkBuilder: GTK+ 2 Reference Manual

## 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.