Re: Toggle in tree view without changing selection

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Jeffrey W. Baker" <jwbaker acm org> writes: 
> I don't understand your objection.  In a list of 1000 items if the
> user wants to toggle 100 of them how do you suggest he do it?  100
> clicks?

I'd agree there's a UI issue here, though I know you weren't asking
about that. ;-)

The issue is that the toggle for each row is a direct manipulation of
that row. So you would expect it to affect a single row.

The way selections work conceptually is that you select, and then
choose an action; but a toggle button on a specific row doesn't map to
an "action" in that sense, or at least I would find it confusing.

The standard thing is for the action to be a menu item. Either on the
toplevel of the application window, or in a right-click. Another
possibility is a button next to the tree widget.

The button approach is used pretty commonly, for example a
"Remove" button that removes the selection.

I don't think it'd be that hard to put together the UI you asked about
though, even if it involved writing a custom GtkCellRenderer - 
GtkCellRendererToggle is not a lot of code, and you could just
cut-and-paste it and tweak in some tiny way. Though I'd guess you
don't even have to, there's probably some hack based on just
g_signal_connect() to one of the relevant signals.

Havoc