Docking Widgets in GTK+

If you've ever used Anjuta or MonoDevelop, you may have noticed the nice docking widgets they use. This is very common and useful for IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). Many people ask how they can get dockable windows in their own GTK+ applications. Well, since there is no built-in widget for this in GTK+, you can use the same libraries that Anjuta and MonoDevelop are using: gdl.

As far as I know, the Anjuta team is currently maintaining gdl. You won't likely find this library with your distributions package manager as it's still somewhat immature, however, you can build it from source by downloading it off of the Gnome FTP Server.

It has more than just a docking widget, it also has a data viewer component (similar to that found in some GUIs for debuggers), a symbol browsing component, and some other things. The down-side is that there is no documentation. You'll have to view the source code of the test programs located in the gdl/ folder of the source tarball.

Here's a screenshot of the test-dock application running on my system (gdl-0.7.7/gdl/test-dock). I'm dragging "Item #2" from the left window to dock into the right side of the window on the left.



Here's a screenshot of the test-dataview application running on my system (gdl-0.7.7/gdl/test-dataview).