LibreOffice Begins Landing GTK4 Support Code

Ahead of this week's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha and the feature freeze / branching next month, initial GTK4 toolkit support code has begun landing in this open-source office suite.

Caolán McNamara of Red Hat has been leading the charge on getting GTK4 toolkit support added to LibreOffice with the initial push having happened yesterday.

Don't get too excited though for the moment as it's still a work-in-progress but seems to be coming along at least well enough that this is sliding in for LibreOffice 7.2 rather than being diverted to the next cycle. The initial push of two thousand lines of code on top of the existing GTK3 support downplayed the usability of it. But then over the past day we've seen more than two dozen commits further refining this GTK4 code.

Among those follow-up commits over the past day have been getting the toolkit code so LibreOffice can start without crashing, wiring up various features into the GTK4 code, various event handling bits, and other adapting to GTK4 interfaces.

Those wanting to follow the bring-up of GTK4 support within LibreOffice can see these Git commits. We'll see how quickly this GTK3 to GTK4 transition happens for LibreOffice and what kind of state it will be in for August's release of LibreOffice 7.2.