Bobby joins GNOME Circle
by Hylke on Wednesday, June 17, 2026Excited that Bobby has been accepted as a GNOME Circle app!
Who’s Bobby?
Bobby is a viewer utility. It displays tables from SQLite files. The most deployed database format in the world. That’s it.
Whilst hacking on the backend of Auroras I was missing an easy way to check my data tables. There are many database management tools, but they seemed too heavy for my use case.
GTK4 and Libadwaita
Releasing something smaller first also was a chance to refamiliarise myself with modern GNOME app development. It was my first serious project using Rust.
GTK is still the rock UI toolkit it has always been. Libadwaita makes it easy for your app to look beautiful and is a lot of fun to use.
The main challenge was hooking up the database backend to the ListModel required to be displayed by the new ColumnView. The struggle was worth it though as it enables Bobby to have lazy loading of rows, smooth scrolling, and a limited memory footprint.
After that using any other widget should be a breeze!
Future
I will keep the scope of the app small, but there are a few features I want to add in the future:
- Encrypted file support
- Updating values in place
- Search
Get Bobby on Flathub and always sanitise your database inputs!