Re: Editable GtkLabel?

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan van berkom gmail com>]

Sven Herzberg wrote:

> On Do, 2006-07-20 at 10:04 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
>  
>
> > In the GTK+ meeting at GUADEC
> > ( http://www.gtk.org/plan/meetings/20060625.txt )
> > there was talk of making GtkLabel editable.
> >
> > For what is this needed?
> >    
>
> You can to use that in UI builders like glade to edit menu items in
> place.
>  
If GtkLabels can be editable, then to be an honest tool, the glade
designer should allow the user to include an editable label in the
app, people will use it regardless of what it was intended for.

Note also that it runs deeper than this, editing labels in line is fine,
but many many widgets hide the label from the user (menu-items
and buttons for instance) and just proxy the text string through a property,
so the text property would have to be updated in some backwards fashion...
probably requiring alot of special-case code from the designer anyway
(and the designer people also probably have other priorities ;-) ).

   I'm not saying that editing labels in place wouldn't be some cool new
UI crack, but I could think of a number of really _usefull_ things that
could be done to gtk+ to help the designer do a better job... a few
things that come to mind:

o fixing the bookkeeping of exposed composite children (composite 
widgets should provide
   a symbolic name for each composite child, and a composite widget 
should have
   a method to retrieve that child by name... this is /somewhat/ 
addressed already).
o runtime introspection of gtk+ versions that properties/widgets/signals
   were introduced in (the fact that they're available in the doc 
statements doesnt really help)
o someone brought up the idea of a unified container api on this list 
recently
   (i.e. any parentable object can parent any childable object, with 
constraints etc).

Cheers,
                         -Tristan