Re: runtime accel changes

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Juan Pablo Ugarte <juanpablougarte gmail com> wrote:

On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 06:22 +0000, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> From what I see... all one should *need* to do is specify the accelerator keys
> desired to trigger a given GtkAction and add that action to an action group
> (either with GtkBuilder constructs or with
> gtk_action_group_add_action_with_accel()).
>
> The fact that a GtkAccelGroup must be added to a GtkWindow... and that it must
> be referred to by the GtkActionGroup (need to set the
> property/relation somewhere)...
> is all a bit sub-par as an API (i.e. it's confusing, not obvious to figure out).
>
> So my basic question is... is there anything good about manually
> setting up these
> accel groups at all ? GIMP is an example of a multi-windowed application (and
> many apps can have a 'floating' editor for some purpose)... as it
> stands whenever
> you create an extra floating window that is not a temporal dialog, you must set
> the GtkAccelGroup manually also for those windows for accelerators to work
> while those windows have focus.
>
> GTK+ of course manages an internal list of the app's GtkWindows... I
> really dont
> see the reason why GtkAccelGroup couldnt just be completely automated...
> could we possibly just deprecate/eventually remove that from the (public) api ?

I do not know about deprecating it, but we could definitely have a
default accelerator group that gets set in every window and action group
by default. This way actions will simply work and if for some reason you
need a window with a different accel group you can always set it later.
I like to keep common cases simple and special cases well special. :)

fundamentally, what differs from window are the available actions. the fact the accels per window *might* be different is just a side-effect of this. therefore, action groups are the primary entity that needs to be attached to a window, not accel groups.

since currently neither action nor accel groups permit sharing of actions or accels, both concepts are pretty useless in GTK right now. most applications end up with a single action group (semantically, anyway) and a single accel group. and if they don't they probably meant to :)