Re: Ideas around bug 50554

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Kristian Rietveld <kristian planet nl> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> A couple of weeks ago Havoc posted a comment to bug 50544 that there was
> another round of comments on the new ComboBox. And that the scope of the
> widget should be widened. I don't know the details of those comments yet,
> but I think I've got a small idea.
> 
> As Owen said earlier, we either have to:
> 
> - get non-editable combo-boxes working and deprecate GtkOptionMenu
> 
> - not allow for non-editable combo-boxes and force people to use
> GtkOptionMenu for this.
> 
> Another idea is to:
> 
> - merge non-editable and editable combo-boxes into one widget. So we've
> got one combo-box which is editable (and with autocompletion) and the
> 'Windows-style' non-editable combo-box to select options (equivalent of
> the 'UNIX-style' option menu).
> 
> Do we want to create a new widget which functions as a editable combo-box
> and a non-editable combo-box or option menu through the same API? If so, I
> think it is the best to start from scratch and design a new API for this
> widget.

The plan that I started to write up a few weeks ago was along the 
lines of:

 - The API would allow only pixmap and text items. I haven't seen any
   use of general widgets in a popup that makes sense.

 - The widget would be theme-settable to display its drop-down either
   as a menu or as a window-style drop-down list.

 - For this reason, the API would not allow direct to the popdown
   but would only have an abstract API for adding items.

 - The items could be arranged in a somewhat flexible table layout
   with row/column-spanning.

 - Support for tabular layouts would be added to GtkMenu to support
   this.

That's very sketchy, of course, and there are a lot more details to 
be supplied. I started writing down a header file, but never really
finished it.

> I would like to volunteer to design and implement this new widget. I know
> there is no time left to get it into 2.0.x, so'll target on the new
> development version (2.1.x if I'm right).

Yes, this definitely looks like a 2.2 feature at this point. So much
to do for 2.0, so little time....

Major 2.2 items at this point look to be including:

 - ComboBox/optionmenu fixing
 - Action-based replacement for GtkItemFactory
 - GtkFileSel replacement
 - Tooltips / what-is-this / context-sensitive help fixups 

So, it's certainly not alone.

We certainly appreciate you working on the combo-box a lot; I feel
bad that we couldn't find time to get our end of the work done
to get it done for GTK+-2.0.

Regards,
                                        Owen