[Glade-devel] Fixed layout

[tristan.van.berkom at gmail.com (Tristan Van Berkom)]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Patrick Hallinan
<patrick.j.hallinan at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> > Sure, remember that you should not use GtkFixed under almost any
> > circumstances,
>
> This is mantra but not necessarily true.? Fixed layout lowers that bar for
> GUI development.? The success of Visual Basic screams that fixed layout is
> valuable.

Sure, after 5 years or so we get tired of going though all the details of
why its important to use resizable containers in GTK+.

Without getting into too many details, suffice it to say that GTK+ isnt
designed to work that way, and the GtkFixed and GtkLayout are just
very primitive implementations of a canvas (i.e. you will get better
results using coordinates + z coordinates in goocanvas or clutter
with a flying textures type environment).

> > GtkFixed is definitely not useful to you if you are
> > writing an application that is supposed to integrate into a desktop
> > environment.
>
> This is mantra but not necessarily true.? It's a question of when to
> experience the pain.

Its just a question of writing an application that will naturally run
on different resulotions with different system font sizes.

The pain is just part of GTK+, on the other hand it would be
really great if somebody cared enough to enhance the Glade
workspace to better manipulate resizable containers in more
intuitive and comprehensible ways.

> > With that in mind, just hold SHIFT key down in the workspace... or
> > push the Drag/Resize button
>
> I'm in the process of changing part of a Dialog and I wanted to do some mock
> ups.? This particular Dialog is created programmcially.? I tried using Glade
> with the Fixed container and I found it too painful.? I guess I'll resort to
> pen and paper.
>
> In the past I've used Visual Studio and/or SharpDevelop to do a mock up but
> I don't have access to Windows at the moment.
>
> > I put on the toolbar because the
> > SHIFT key was so undiscoverable.
>
> Even the icon was undiscoverable to me because I've used Glade in the past.
>
> I think that a perfect open source world would have a Lua (or Python)
> development environment with a GUI builder that had a simple mode with all
> the features of Visual Basic and an advanced mode with the beloved
> GtkBox's.

Again, using GtkBox is just the way its done in GTK+, in a perfect world
the GTK+ plugin for Glade would offer great support for GtkBox manipulation,
and then the goocanvas or clutter plugin would obviously work with coordinates,
because the toolkits are coordinate based -- GTK+ is simply not
coordinate based.

Cheers,
          -Tristan