Since version 2.12, GTK+ provides GtkBuilder to construct user interfaces from XML descriptions, similar to the functionality provided by GladeXML in the libglade library.

A good way to start a migration from libglade to GtkBuilder is to run the gtk-builder-convert utility on your glade file, and inspect the resulting output. If your code uses the root parameter of glade_xml_new(), you may want to split your glade file into multiple GtkBuilder files by using the --root option of gtk-builder-convert. Alternatively, you can use gtk_builder_add_objects_from_file() to construct only certain objects from a GtkBuilder file.

Alternatively, you can open the glade file with glade3 and then save it in GtkBuilder format. This is supported by glade3 since version 3.6.

GladeXML*

GtkBuilder*

glade_xml_new (FILE, "first_widget", NULL)

GError* error = NULL;
GtkBuilder* builder = gtk_builder_new ();
if (!gtk_builder_add_from_file (builder, FILE, &error))
  {
    g_warning ("Couldn't load builder file: s", error->message);
    g_error_free (error);
  }

glade_xml_get_widget (gxml, “widget_name”)

GTK_WIDGET (gtk_builder_get_object (builder, “widget_name”))

glade_get_widget_name (widget)

gtk_widget_get_name (widget)

glade_xml_get_widget_prefix (gxml, “prefix”)

While GtkBuilder strives to be a complete replacement for libglade, there are a number of areas where it is currently still behind libglade: