14 DAY TRIAL // On October 15, Christian Hergert, the lead developer and creator of the open-source GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) software, announced the release and immediate availability for download of GNOME Builder 3.18.1 as part of GNOME 3.18.1.
The biggest new feature of GNOME Builder 3.18.1 is initial support for the Vala programming language by implementing a plugin that depends on the libvala 0.30 library and supports functions like jump to definition, autocompletion, a symbol tree, as well as as-you-type error highlighting.
The GNOME community is urged to contribute to this Vala plugin in order to make it better and much more useful to developers. Moreover, users can now write their own plugins in the Vala programming language. If you attempt to write such a plugin, please note that *.vapi files are being generated for gnome-builder 1.0 and libide 1.0 libraries.
"Just like the 3.16 cycle, we are moving fast despite the dot release nature of this cycle. We have a lot to get done and we want our lovely users helping us test this young program," says Christian Hergert. "Thanks to all of our more than 20 contributors since 3.18.0."
Faster autocompletion, support for fuzzy completion, more
Among other highlights of the GNOME Builder 3.18.1 IDE, we can mention that the autocompletion has progressed a lot and it's much faster than before in most scenarios, there's now support for fuzzy completion in most autocompletion engines, the Python Jedi completion has been greatly enhanced, and the stability of the symbol tree panel has been improved as well.
The search workflow has also received various improvements, a new generic block font called BuilderBlocks has been implemented for the overview map, it is now possible to reindent lines, support for alternate coding styles has been added to the C indenter, and users can now draw marks for newlines, spaces, leading spaces, non-breaking whitespace, tabs, and trailing.
Furthermore, there's now a new button in the Editor, which lets developers jump to the next error or warning, the --enable-*-plugin argument has been fixed, several crashes have been patched, various coverity warnings have been addressed, numerous language translations have been updated, the content type loading now works correctly, and Jedi completion proposals are now capable of displaying the right word.
Last but not least, GNOME Builder 3.18.1 comes with various stability and compatibility improvements to the Emacs and Vim editors, and the ctags plugin has been updated with the ability to defer tags generation to automakes 'make ctags.' Download GNOME Builder 3.18.1 right now from Softpedia.