Since version 2.12, GTK+ provides #GtkBuilder to construct user interfaces from XML descriptions, similar to the functionality provided by #GladeXML in the libglade library. A good way to start a migration from libglade to GtkBuilder is using glade3 to convert your .glade file. If your code uses the @root parameter of glade_xml_new(), you can use gtk_builder_add_objects_from_file() to construct only certain objects from a GtkBuilder file. Alternatively, GTK+ also offers the gtk-builder-convert script you can use to do the conversion; in which case you should be careful to inspect the output and make sure you didn't lose any data. libgladeGtkBuilder ]]> not needed GladeXML* GtkBuilder* glade_xml_new (FILE, "first_widget", NULL) GError* error = NULL; GtkBuilder* builder = gtk_builder_new (); if (!gtk_builder_add_from_file (builder, FILE, &error)) { g_warning ("Couldn't load builder file: %s", error->message); g_error_free (error); } glade_xml_get_widget (gxml, “widget_name”) GTK_WIDGET (gtk_builder_get_object (builder, “widget_name”)) glade_get_widget_name (widget) gtk_widget_get_name (widget) glade_xml_get_widget_prefix (gxml, “prefix”) can be emulated by gtk_builder_get_objects (builder) together with manual filtering. It returns a GSList* instead of a GList* though. While GtkBuilder strives to be a complete replacement for libglade, there are a number of areas where it is currently still behind libglade: GtkBuilder supports context information in translatable properties in a slightly different way than libglade. Intltool does not yet support this; see bug 454894 for the current status of intltool support for GtkBuilder files. Thankfully, context in translations is a rarely used feature, and if you are not using it, intltools glade format support works just fine for GtkBuilder files. While libglade can often tolerate multiple widgets having the same id in a glade file, GtkBuilder will not accept duplicate object ids. Both gtk-builder-convert and the GtkBuilder parser emit warnings when they see duplicate ids.