Generates a new application from a template, hiding all the boring copy-paste stuff from the developer. Includes templates for Gjs and PyGObject applications that handle autotools, i18n, gtkbuilder, gsettings, appdata, desktop files, etc.

It's a command line utility written in Python + standard library.

Generate a new application skeleton, running the generator tool from the repository, eg.

./gtk-app-generator.py com.github.user.FancyApplication -N "The Application Name" -B fancy-application -o ~/gnome --summary "A short description of the app" --url http://www.example.com/fancy-application

This will create a folder under ~/gnome/ called fancy-application, and initialize it with an GIT repository. It will take care of the initial commit too.

Switch to the application repository and set it up

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local --libdir=/usr/local/lib64
make

Interesting files to edit:

• data/ is for data files, and src/ for source files
• data/app-menu.ui has the application menu, in GtkBuilder format
• data/main.ui has the header bar and one empty grid for the application, you'll probably want to replace this with something appropriate to your app
• data/com.github.user.FancyApplication.appdata.xml.in is the appdata description (for gnome-software), and data/com.github.user.FancyApplication.desktop.in is the desktop file (for the gnome-shell app picker)
• data/com.github.user.FancyApplication.gschema.xml has the GSettings schemas
• If you need to add one source module, edit src/Makefile.am
• If you need to add one data file that can be loaded by the application (eg. CSS or image), edit src/com.github.user.FancyApplication.gresource.xml. You don't need to edit data/Makefile.am, it will be compiled and distributed automatically