Re: combo rant

[Greg Breland <gbreland mozillanews org>]

My current project requires that I write wrappers around all common GTK
and Win32 .NET controls to give them a common functionality set.  Sort
of like what wxWindows would do but much much more simple with much less
functionality.

I mention this because with the exception of the GtkComboBox control,
GTK flat out embarrasses the .NET widgets.  Most of the time I'm
struggling to make the .NET controls do something simple while scaling
the GTK functionality back dramatically.  It isn't so much that the GTK
combo is bad, but way to complex.  I would say the Win32 combo is much
better, but at least it's simple.

To be fair, I've worked with combo controls from at least 4 different
widget sets and they all were horrible.  Win32, GTK, Web, Borland, Java,
they all suck.  I think as a control, the combo control is just a bad
concept.

I will probably create my own combo type control in addition to the
native Win32/GTK combo box controls.  It will basically be a text field
with a button directly to the right of it.  When the button is clicked a
separate window will be opened with a grid inside it.  This allows me to
bypass all the horrible problems with combos on each platform.  It will
be a little slower for a user to use than a combo, but the ease of use
should be better since the user/developer can resize the grid, etc if
needed.


On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 13:55, control H wrote:
> [I already posted this to the gtk-list, I'm not sure which list I should use]
>
> I'll start with apologies for upcoming rant. In general I like Gtk:
> I'm programming with it for a couple of years now and it's easy to
> learn, reasonably fast, has many bindings, runs on windows, and is
> highly themable. However, an ever returning frustration for me is the
> lack of a decent combobox. With every release of Gtk I hoped for a
> better combo, but to be fair, GtkCombo is in some ways still a better
> option than GtkComboBox.