GTK

A free cross-platform widget toolkit.

GTK is a free, cross-platform widget toolkit that is the foundation for GNOME applications, GIMP, Inkscape, and many others. Widgets, layout containers, signals, and an event-driven main loop are the core primitives; CSS-based theming controls appearance, and animations and transitions are first-class features in GTK 4.

The toolkit was originally written for GIMP in 1998 and split into a separate project as it became clear that other applications could use it. GTK has gone through several major versions: GTK 2 (2002), GTK 3 (2011), and GTK 4 (2020), each introducing meaningful improvements but requiring source-level porting for downstream apps.

GTK is governed by the GNOME Foundation and developed under the LGPL-2.1 licence. Bindings exist for many languages — C and Vala (canonical), Python (PyGObject), Rust (gtk-rs), JavaScript (GJS) — which lets developers write GTK applications in their preferred language while sharing a common UI stack.

License: LGPL-2.1-or-later

Category: Developer tools

Website: https://www.gtk.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install gtk4-devel
Arch:          sudo pacman -S gtk4

Authors

GNOME Foundation and contributors

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