Thank you! Nice that people care about my work on GTK1. I haven't announced a GTK1 release, so don’t expect it to be stable yet.

GTK1 interests me as it is necessary to build retro apps I like. CinePaint being one, and also dozens of other classic GTK apps. A technical reason to care about GTK1 is code size. GTK2 is much larger than GTK1. GTK3 is much larger than GTK2.

> it seems to be based on Gtk1.2 but it is its own thing.

Yes. Historically, GTK1 was maintained as 3 separate projects across the 3 major operating systems by three different teams, not a single codebase. I created the Windows port. Later I took over the MacOS port that someone had started, but had abandoned before completion. After gtk.org deprecated Linux GTK1, I took on that code, too.

As I combine code from different versions of GTK1 from different operating systems, it breaks things. My current effort is to complete integration of the MacOS and Linux code with my Windows code, and remove resultant bugs.

> maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches.

GTK1 is of a GTK 1.2 flavor plus some enhancements. Yes, I want to smooth off old rough edges, to make GTK1 better with fonts and pixbuffers.

> I present you gtkaa [GTK1 anti-aliasing patch]

Thank you! Will take a stab at integrating that. I previously integrated the GTK1 dark-mode patch. If there are other interesting GTK1 patches in the archives somewhere, let me know. I’ve heard that gtk.org wasn’t very welcoming to GTK1 patches.

> Is there a lightweight distribution of GTK2?

Maybe in the future.

CinePaint conditionally compiled with GTK1 or GTK2 using an #ifdef. Not a lot of changes to make it build either as GTK1 or GTK2. The GTK2 API broke GTTK1 compatibility in some silly ways. For example, changing the order or arguments in function calls of the same name. Or, making an API that took one call in GTK1 take 2 calls in GTK2, or vice versa. Minor stuff, at least in the calls used by CinePaint.

Are other GTK1 apps as easy to port to GTK2 as was CinePaint? I want to add common GTK2 APIs to GTK1 to see how that goes. Doing so would make GTK1 into a very lightweight implementation of the GTK2 API.