Re: selectable labels

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com> writes: 
> <devil's advocate>
> 
> Fair comment-- but isn't that exactly what text fields are for?  You can
> already put dynamically-variable text in a text field (non-editable if
> need be), at which point I assume it should support selection, copying
> and inclusion in the tab sequence by default?  
> 
> The only addition you would have to make to the text field widget then
> is a "don't draw a border around me" flag, if there isn't such a thing
> already, for cases where you really didn't want one... but the border
> itself is a good visual cue that you can select and copy from this text,
> even if you can't actually edit it.  But with ordinary labels, how can
> you tell which ones you can copy from and which you can't, without
> actually trying?
> 
> </da>
> 

I'm guessing most people writing GTK apps would express their
objection to this as "I don't want it to look like a text box, I want
it to look like a label."

Which isn't very helpful (though "ugly" can be a valid concern), but
the intuition I'd guess that's based on is that a text box looks
editable, even if it isn't. i.e. if you have a text box with the white
background and frame border, people try to type in it and realize they
can't.

Does that outweigh the keyboard navigation issue? I don't know.

Havoc