Gtk4 Tutorial for beginners

This tutorial illustrates how to write C programs with Gtk4 library. It focuses on beginners so the contents are limited to basic things. The table of contents are shown at the end of this abstract.

• Section 3 to 20 describes basics and the example is a simple editor tfe (Text File Editor).
• Section 21 to 23 describes GtkDrawingArea.
• Section 24 to 27 describes list model and list view (GtkListView, GtkGridView and GtkColumnView). It also describes GtkExpression.

Please refer Gnome API reference for further topics.

This tutorial is under development and unstable. Even though the examples written in C language have been tested on gtk4 version 4.0, there might exist bugs. If you find any bugs, errors or mistakes in the tutorial and C examples, please let me know. You can post it to github issues. The latest version of the tutorial is located at Gtk4-tutorial github repository. You can read it without download.

If you want to get a html or pdf version, you can make them with rake, which is a ruby version of make. There is a documentation how to make them.

If you have a question, feel free to post an issue. Any question is helpful to make this tutorial get better.

Table of contents

1. Prerequisite and License
2. Installation of gtk4 to linux distributions
3. GtkApplication and GtkApplicationWindow
4. Widgets (1)
5. Widgets (2)
6. Widgets (3)
7. Define Child object
8. Ui file and GtkBuilder
9. Build system
10. Instance and class
11. Signals
12. Functions in TfeTextView
13. Functions in GtkNotebook
14. tfeapplication.c
15. tfe5 source files
16. Menu and action
17. Stateful action
18. Ui file for menu and action entries
19. GtkMenuButton, accelerators, font, pango and gsettings
20. Template XML
21. GtkDrawingArea and Cairo
22. Combine GtkDrawingArea and TfeTextView
23. Tiny turtle graphics interpreter
24. GtkListView
25. GtkGridView and activate signal
26. GtkExpression
27. GtkColumnView