holly molly.. just stumbled upon this paragraph in [termite#readme] while searching for [dirs] this provided a many fold increase to my love for gtk too 🤣😘
[termite#readme]: https://github.com/thestinger/termite#readme [dirs]: https://alternativeto.net/browse/search/?q=dirs
https://github.com/thestinger/termite/blob/18de7682e983e6562a87c63a2814c5e39...
VTE is a terrible base for building a modern, fast and safe terminal emulator. It's slow, brittle and difficult to improve. VTE is treated as simply being the GNOME Terminal widget rather than a library truly intended to be useful to others.
They've gone out of the way to keep useful APIs private due to hostility towards implementing any kind of user interface beyond what they provide.
In 2012, we submitted a [tiny patch exposing the APIs needed for the keyboard text selection, hints mode and other features](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658). Despite support from multiple other projects, the patch was rejected. It's now almost a decade later and no progress has been made. There is no implementation of these kinds of features in VTE and it's unlikely they'll be provided either internally or as flexible APIs.
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use.