14 DAY TRIAL // As part of the upcoming GNOME 3.24.1 desktop, GNOME Builder developer Christian Hergert launched today, April 11, 2017, the first point release of the GNOME Builder 3.24 open-source integrated development environment (IDE) application.
GNOME Builder 3.24.1 is the first maintenance update to the 3.24 stable branch of the IDE, which launched at the end of March along with the major GNOME 3.24 desktop environment release. And, as usual, the developer managed to add numerous improvements and new features to his amazing project.
Prominent features shipping with the GNOME Builder 3.24.1 release include Rustfmt support for Rust, floating ref improvements for JSON-RPC, support for live editing of Sphinx documentation, the ability to activate the "Install" action from the command bar to install a project without the need to run it first.
The Symbol Resolvers gained the ability to support locating all references to a symbol using the Ctrl+Shift+Space keybinding, which allows the editor to move between them, but it's currently only supported on Rust/RLS. Additionally, the file monitor should now be a lot more stable during rename events.
More Flatpak improvements, bug fixes
As with every new release of GNOME Builder, the Flatpak support gets improved. GNOME Builder 3.24.1 changes the Flatpak manifest discovery to breadth-first search and adds a menu item to allow developers to launch a terminal emulator in Flatpak.
Moreover, manifest's build-args are now used when building your project with flatpak build, though this is not a Flatpak specific change. For consistency, the Flatpak version of the application will be used to look up plugins in the ~/.local/share/gnome-builder/plugins folder of the host system.
Among other improvements, we can mention that pipeline stages are now allowed to imply that stdout should be checked for errors, network access is now possible from the fallback flatpak launcher, the new release allows to make use of the "flatpak-builder --run" command when possible, and improves UI interactivity by lowering diagnosis priority.
The Vim mode was improved as well in GNOME Builder 3.24.1 by implementing support for reformat-selection with gq, but it's currently only used for Rust/RLS. Several Rust RLS fixes are also present in this update, along with numerous memory leak and build system fixes.
Below we've attached the full changelog of the GNOME Builder 3.24.1 release if you want to know what exactly has been changed, and you can download the source tarball right now from our website if you fancy compiling the software project on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.