Home

Awesome

SwiftGtkListViewDemo

A simple demo showing how to create gtk list views (using GtkTreeView) in Swift

macOS 11 build macOS 10.15 build macOS gtk4 build Ubuntu 20.04 build Ubuntu 18.04 build

Building

Make sure you have all the prerequisites installed (see below). After that, you can simply clone this repository and build the command line executable (be patient, this will download all the required dependencies and take a while to compile) using

git clone https://github.com/rhx/SwiftGtkListViewDemo.git
cd SwiftGtkListViewDemo
./run-gir2swift.sh
swift build

You can run the program using

swift run

A simple, empty 'Hello World' window should appear. To exit the program, click the close button or press Control-C in the Terminal window.

macOS

Please note that on macOS, due to a bug currently in the Swift Package Manager, you need to pass in the build flags manually, i.e. instead of swift build and swift run you can run

swift build `./run-gir2swift.sh flags -noUpdate`
swift run   `./run-gir2swift.sh flags -noUpdate`

Application Bundler

Under macOS, you can also create an Application bundle that you can create and open directly:

./app-bundle.sh
open .build/app/GtkListViewDemo.app

This bundle is self-contained and you can move it to your Applications folder (or wherever it suits you), e.g.:

mv .build/app/GtkListViewDemo.app /Applications

Xcode

On macOS you can also build the project using Xcode instead (but there is no full macOS app target yet, only a command-line executable). To do this, you need to create an Xcode project first, then open the project in the Xcode IDE:

./xcodegen.sh
open GtkListViewDemo.xcodeproj

After that, select the executable target (not the Bundle/Framework target with the same name as the executable) and use the (usual) Build and Run buttons to build/run your project.

What is new?

Experimental support for gtk 4 was added via the gtk4 branch.

Version 12 of gir2swift pulls in PR#10, addressing several issues:

Partially implemented:

Other Notable changes

Version 11 introduces a new type system into gir2swift, to ensure it has a representation of the underlying types. This is necessary for Swift 5.3 onwards, which requires more stringent casts. As a consequence, accessors can accept and return idiomatic Swift rather than underlying types or pointers. This means that a lot of the changes will be source-breaking for code that was compiled against libraries built with earlier versions of gir2swift.

Prerequisites

Building should work with at least Swift 5.2 (Swift 5.3 is required for gtk4). You can download Swift from https://swift.org/download/ -- if you are using macOS, make sure you have the command line tools installed as well (install them using xcode-select --install). Test that your compiler works using swift --version, which should give you something like

$ swift --version
Apple Swift version 5.3.2 (swiftlang-1200.0.45 clang-1200.0.32.28)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin20.3.0

on macOS, or on Linux you should get something like:

$ swift --version
Swift version 5.3.2 (swift-5.3.2-RELEASE)
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Gtk 3.22 or higher

The Swift wrappers have been tested with glib-2.56, 2.58, 2.60, 2.62, and 2.64, and gdk/gtk 3.22, 3.24, and 4.0 on the gtk4 branch. They should work with higher versions, but YMMV. Also make sure you have gobject-introspection and its .gir files installed.

Linux

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 you can use the gtk that comes with the distribution. Just install with the apt package manager:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 gobject-introspection libgirepository1.0-dev libxml2-dev

If you prefer a newer version of gtk, you can also install it from the GNOME 3 Staging PPA (see https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/ubuntu/gnome3-staging), but be aware that this can be a bit dangerous (as this removes packages that can be vital, particularly if you use a GNOME-based desktop), so only do this if you know what you are doing:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev gir1.2-gtksource-3.0 gobject-introspection libgirepository1.0-dev libxml2-dev
Fedora

On Fedora 29, you can use the gtk that comes with the distribution. Just install with the dnf package manager:

sudo dnf install gtk3-devel pango-devel cairo-devel cairo-gobject-devel glib2-devel gobject-introspection-devel libxml2-devel

macOS

On macOS, you can install gtk using HomeBrew (for setup instructions, see http://brew.sh). Once you have a running HomeBrew installation, you can use it to install a native version of gtk:

brew update
brew install gtk+3 glib glib-networking gobject-introspection pkg-config

Troubleshooting

Here are some common errors you might encounter and how to fix them.

Old Swift toolchain or Xcode

If you get an error such as

$ ./build.sh 
error: unable to invoke subcommand: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift-package (No such file or directory)

this probably means that your Swift toolchain is too old. Make sure the latest toolchain is the one that is found when you run the Swift compiler (see above).

If you get an older version, make sure that the right version of the swift compiler is found first in your PATH. On macOS, use xcode-select to select and install the latest version, e.g.:

sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app
xcode-select --install

Known Issues

As a workaround, you can use the old build scripts, e.g. ./build.sh (instead of run-gir2swift.sh and swift build) to build a package.