Re: gtk-devel-list Digest, Vol 157, Issue 4

[Daniel Boles <dboles src gmail com>]

Date: Wed, 03 May 2017 15:45:14 +0200
From: Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>
To: Timm B?der <mail baedert org>
Cc: gtk-devel-list <gtk-devel-list gnome org>
Subject: Re: gtk4: gtk_box_pack_start()/end() porting
Message-ID: <1493819114.24525.3.camel@murrayc.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

On Wed, 2017-05-03 at 15:45 +0200, Timm B?der wrote:
[snip]
> [1]Even though spacing *should* probably be handled by the theme, so
> the
> theme can decide whether UIs are more spacey or more narrow, nobody
> has
> come up with a proper way for applications to specify that.

Yes, I've never liked how applications have all these magic values
sprinkled through their code.

Thanks for the explanation.

--
Murray

In case anyone is interested in my anecdote...

I'm using GTK+ 3 (for the forseeable future) but have stopped using widget :margin and :spacing - juuust in case they get removed at some point in the future. There's a general trickle of things like that being removed from the widget side, so better safe than sorry.

Doing these in CSS instead - while it involves some horrifying hacks that almost certainly break some cases, which I don't use yet - does mean that I can use relative units like em for spacing out my UI. That said, this also means that (unless I start generating CSS providers on the fly) I have to know in advance which levels of spaciness I want and define them as CSS classes.

But, whatever the limitations may be, this is working for me right now, and it's liberating both in the sense of cleaning up my source code and scaling far better with changes to font size, DPI, etc.