Further Reading

The previous edition’s bibliography was a list of tutorials from 2006 to 2009. Almost every one of them is now either offline or describes a library that no longer exists, so it has been replaced with the places worth reading today.

The single most useful habit: when something in this book disagrees with the API reference, the API reference is right and this book is out of date.

Reference documentation

The API references

https://docs.gtk.org/ — GTK 4, GDK, GSK, Gio, GLib, GObject and Pango, all generated from the same sources as the C documentation and kept current.

PyGObject

https://pygobject.gnome.org/ — the binding itself: how introspection maps C onto Python, what gi.require_version does, and the awkward corners (GObject.Property, closures, threading).

libadwaita

https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/ — every Adw widget used in Part I, with pictures.

The freedesktop specifications

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ — the desktop entry format, the icon naming specification, the base directory specification and the menu specification. Dry, short, and the authority when something will not appear in a launcher.

Guidance rather than API

The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

https://developer.gnome.org/hig/ — when to use a switch and when a check button, how a dialog should be worded, what a header bar is for. Worth reading once end to end; it explains a lot of why GTK 4 removed things.

The GNOME Developer Documentation

https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/ — tutorials and “how do I” material above the level of the API reference, including the parts of application development this book covers in Part I.

Things to read the source of

GTK 4 Demo and GTK 4 Widget Factory

Installed with the GTK development packages as gtk4-demo and gtk4-widget-factory. gtk4-demo shows its own source for every example, which makes it the fastest answer to “how is this widget actually used”. gtk4-demo is C, but the API is the same API.

Adwaita Demo

adwaita-1-demo, the same idea for libadwaita.

GNOME applications in Python

Reading a finished application teaches the parts a book leaves out — how a real project lays out its Meson build, its resources and its state. Most GNOME applications are hosted at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/.

Tools worth having installed

gtk4-icon-browser

Searchable index of every icon in the theme. See Icon Names.

The GTK Inspector

GTK_DEBUG=interactive python3 app.py. A live widget tree, a CSS editor that applies as you type, and a way to see which widget is actually receiving your events.

gdbus, busctl, D-Spy

For looking at the session bus before writing anything against it. See D-Bus.

gst-launch-1.0, gst-inspect-1.0

For prototyping a pipeline in seconds rather than minutes. See Audio and Video with GStreamer.

flatpak-builder

For building the manifest in Packaging and Distribution.

Where the previous edition went

This book began as PyGTK Notebook, covering PyGTK and GTK 2 between 2008 and

1. That material is preserved in the git history of this repository, and the last PDF built from the original LyX source is at

http://files.majorsilence.com/pygtkbook/pygtk-notebook-latest-0.13.pdf.

If you are porting something written against it, start with Migrating from PyGTK.