Re: selectable labels

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com> writes: 
> Is it really that hard?  I haven't done anything too complex, but any
> dialogs I've designed and built with Glade "just work" when you add
> underlines to the widget labels.  (Except the notebook widget-- if you
> add underlines to notebook tabs, pressing Alt+label doesn't switch to
> that tab).  

Glade makes it pretty easy to do the accelerator stuff. It's pretty
confusing and overengineered on the GTK level if you try to write
things in C manually, with GtkBindingSet, GtkAccelGroup,
GtkAccelLabel, and all this. You have to understand way too much about
the guts of GTK to figure it out, and it's poorly documented. So it
needs some rethinking/simplifying. But we ended up punting this
problem out of 2.0, mostly because we want to rethink it in a fairly
global way and address the issue of convenient menu/toolbar creation
at the same time.

I think boilerplate examples for all the main things you want to do
will get us really far, so people can just copy those without having
to understand it. e.g. we want to take demos/gtk-demo which is our
installed demo/tutorial program, and fully keyboard-enable that. 

We do have the notebook widget problem on the 2.0 API freeze list to
be done for 2.0, since that's an immediately pressing issue.
 
> > Try to control ghex from keyboard, for example. When you are inside
> > editor/viewer, alt-f will not bring you to menu. In fact, I could not
> > figure out how to get to the menu.
> 
> Same in gnotepad, unless you give focus to the status area first, which
> isn't exactly intuitive  :o)  (Plus you can only do that with the mouse,
> which rather defeats the purpose!)
> 

The problem there is that GtkText eats the Alt-f as "move forward
word." Our new rule is that the editable widgets don't get to use Alt-
shortcuts by default (but Emacs die-hards can set them to do so in
their .gtkrc).

Although the new GtkTextView does still eat Alt-f at the moment, Owen
is making me change it. ;-)

Havoc