Although I am new to GTK programming myself, I did recently do some research on LibGlade and weighed it's pros and cons. I wrote 2 tutorials on using Anjuta and Glade on my website, one using Glade's code generation and one using libglade. Now you say to give you one good reason that you should use libglade... well that depends on your goals it would seem. If you are striving to develop minimal apps using GTK in a small scale setting and don't mind to re-compile for various minor changes, then using Glade to build your code is fine. I have found that despite the abundance of talk from experienced GTK developers to use libglade, it is not necessary if you are doing a simple little minimalistic program.

Libglade, which I am growing quite fond of, is particularly usefull with developing applications in GTK specifically for Gnome. That is what is suprising about the statement that using libglade requires an abundance of "extra" libraries. Are you not using Gnome? For me it required 1 library when developing with libglade and that was libglade-devel. It seems much of Gnome's applications are built this way and yes, it's to separate logic from design. The programmer can write the program without having to recompile for requests to "move this over" or to update the interface with a more contemporary design. Also, as more and more GTK/Gnome developers are moving to the use of libglade, it's nice to stay in practice with the norms when developing applications so that, should there be a need, it's easier to get help on your project or turn the project over to another developer.

A good example that I can think of regarding libglade, is back when I was developing Windows software and there was a transition from beveled toolbar buttons being the "contemporary look" to flat, active toolbar buttons being the norm. It sure would have been handy to have something like libglade then. I had to rebuild my application with a new customized active X control and release a new version. And think about how easy it would be to have multiple "prototypes" of a design and being able to decide on one without re-writing any code. Well, I'm sold.

I want to write GTK programs *not* specifically Gnome programs. Thanks. I detest Gnome-specific dependencies to GTK programs.

I'd have to say, I still recommend glade interface designer. Even if you still need to tweak it out a lot, it saves you hours of looking up calls. And it doesn't need libglade to work.

Yes. I'd use the code generation of glade which produces pure GTK code in C. There doesn't seem much wrong with that, though I'll give the other options like libglade, gtkmm a go.