GTK+ 2.20 adds new functionality while maintaining source and binary compatibility with GTK+ 2.18. Highlights of new features and improvements in GTK+ 2.20 are:
Noteworthy changes:
- GtkSpinner, GtkCellRendererSpinner – A new widget that renders a ‘spinner’ animation to indicate ongoing activity. The corresponding cell renderer renders the same animation inside a treeview
- GtkOffscreenWindow – A new toplevel container widget to manage offscreen rendering of child widgets
- GtkNotebook – You can now show ‘action widgets’ in the space that is not occupied by tabs. This functionality is also available in GtkBuilder via the ‘action-start’ and ‘action-end’ child types.
- Filechooser – GtkFileSystemModel has been reimplemented, for major speedup and simplifications.
- Keyboard handling – The compose sequences understood by the builtin input method have been synced with X.org, and the additional sequences have been rationalized
- Mnemonic underlines – Can now optionally be hidden until the Alt key is pressed, this can be turned on with the gtk-auto-mnemonics setting
- Keyboard accelerators – The Super, Meta and Hyper modifiers are working more reliably
- GDK – There is a new function to get the ‘primary’ monitor in multi-monitor setups: gdk_screen_get_primary_monitory.
- gdk-pixbuf – Embedded color profiles in png and tiff images can be stored and retrieved. Support for the QTIF image format has been added
- Win32 – XP themes have been disabled since they don’t work
- OS X – GTK+ uses standard Mac keyboard shortcuts (Cmd-X/Cmd-C instead of Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C, etc). The handling of multi-monitor setups has been greatly improved
- Introspection support – Introspection data is now included in GTK+ itself. As a consequence, a dependency on gobject-introspection has been added
