[hpfr]

It seems to me we’re seeing something of a native GNOME application renaissance, both core and third-party, buoyed by GTK 4 and Flatpak (as well as the trend towards immutable base images). Rust seems to be part of this too—Loupe, Fractal, and Emmanuele Bassi’s recent GUADEC talk on oxidizing GTK¹ are examples. There are now three newer VTE-based terminal emulators targeting a native GNOME UX: Console (C), Black Box (Vala), and Prompt (C). Is there something about VTE or terminal emulators that makes Rust less appealing, or is this just a coincidence? I’m curious.

Prompt will probably be my next terminal emulator. That inspector looks interesting. Have you seen Ghostty’s recent demo²?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVWrllJQJ_s&t=6155s

2: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-devlog-005#terminal-in...

[audidude]

I might be biased, because I'm the author, but I think GNOME Builder making it dead simple to install an IDE from Flatpak, create a GTK 4 application template in numerous languages, and click run/debug/profile/valgrind and you're off to the races had a lot to do with it. It even installs the SDKs and extensions for you so your new-developer setup is install, clone this url, click run.

We built Flatpak and Builder in concert from the beginning to foster this exact outcome.

But as for language? I already hack on GTK/GDK/GSK internals in C, a mix of C++ and C to contribute to VTE, and Builder is 250k of C with another 200k in associated libraries. I'm just better at it and language bindings are never an issue.

[hpfr]

Makes sense. I should give Builder a try sometime. Thanks for your work!