Xfce Development Information

Introduction

For new developers, it is recommended to read the Ultimate Contributor's Guide to Xfce in order to get an impression on how to contribute to Xfce.

To request a contributor account, please see the docs for more information.
Before getting involved with development, it may help to check the current roadmap to get an overview of our current progress.
A guide to using Git with Xfce can be found here.
For more information on making a release, see Making a Release.
Xfce API documentation can be found on the Xfce development Wiki.

There are various ways to get in touch with Xfce developers:

For general questions, the Xfce's Forum, the Xfce mailing list and our Matrix channel #xfce are places to go.
For any translation stuff, join the Xfce-i18n mailing list.
For anything code related, join our Matrix channel #xfce-dev or write to the Xfce-dev mailing list.
The Xfce Matrix space gives an overview on all available Xfce related Matrix channels. (not yet supported by all matrix clients)
The former communication channels on IRC, #xfce and #xfce-dev on Libera can still be accessed, though they are not officially supported anymore.

All Xfce developers have a real life and live across multiple time zones. If you don't get an answer straight away, be patient and stay online!

Use whatever text editor/IDE you are comfortable with.
The terminal is your friend, get used to it, then you will love it.
If you want a local Docker-based build environment and build script check out the xfce-build script and the xfce/xfce-build:latest container.
Now that almost all components are gtk3-based, GtkInspector is an invaluable tool.
Offline documentation browser such as Devhelp is faster and more convenient than using a web browser.
Glade is a WYSIWYG interface editor, many Xfce components have their UI created using this editor.
D-Feet is useful when dealing with D-Bus.
Tricky bugs will need advanced tools to find their cause, in this case gdb and valgrind are good companions.
Xorg’s utilities, for instance xev and xprop.
xfce-test is a Docker container “based on Ubuntu with a build from git sources of all core Xfce components” used for testing and development. See the Xfce-test Quick Start Guide for basic installation instructions.