Also, regarding Vte I wanted to prevent that the utils lib always depends on Vte even if no plugin is enabled which uses it. That's why there is this "cross-reference" in the makefiles. I didn't know a better way to do it. If there is a cleaner way for archiving this then I am open for suggestions.
Look at https://github.com/geany/geany-plugins/pull/787/commits/347a0c15fa1d67d3830c... :)
Vte compatibility code might not be used often but there are definitely some plugins which still need to be ported to Gtk3. […]
I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to have VTE compatibility code in that utils lib, but that in the current state it doesn't seem super friendly for other users to me. But indeed it can be improved and made to fit in the future as consumers grow.