Re: [g-a-devel] AccessibleTerminal Interface ?

[Samuel Thibault <samuel thibault ens-lyon org>]

Hi,

Bill Haneman, le Mon 06 Jun 2005 19:18:28 +0100, a dit :
> As for line-by-line access, are you using AccessibleText_getTextAtOffset 
> () with the "LINE" parameter?

I considered this possibility, but it can't be used, because it needs
knowing the offset of some char in the wanted line anyway. One can't
directly get some row without knowing previous lines' length. Hence one
ends up keeping record of line lengths, which is much uselessly tricky.

> I think you can get what you want rather directly that way.

Unfortunately no. And it makes things more difficult in the vte widget
as well: it has to manage offsets too (which is just as much uselessly
tricky).

And I repeat: on the contrary to texts, terminals really _don't_ need to
have a linear notion of its content. Terminals manipulate lines of text.
So defining a surrounding interface for terminals makes sense to me. We
shouldn't blow up the AccessibleText interface (by adding a getNthLine()
function for instance), while defining a simple AccessibleTerminal would
work nicely.

> Also, we already have a "text-changed:replace" event, but it apparently 
> isn't used by the vte implementation of ATK yet; perhaps that is for a 
> technical reason, i.e. an artifact of the vte implementation.

That's possible indeed. BTW, documentation seems missing on these
signals. The "try-and-see" way of discovering is not much efficient :)

> We need someone to take over maintenance of the vte ATK implementation, 
> patches would be welcome.

I don't know if someone works on this: my bug is still in the
UNCONFIRMED state, though it is really easy to reproduce.

Regards,
Samuel