Re: combo rant

[control H <control h gmail com>]

> Well, I must admit that I haven't used Windows more than occasionaly for the
> last three or four years, but the last time I checked, Windows combo box was
> much _worse_ than GTK+'s, in my opinion.  You would often get a five-line
> combo where you'd have to scroll like hell to skip all those 200 items to
> get to the one you want.

Ok it certainly sucks when you have to scroll those 200 items within a five-line
combo. But that's part of the programmers job I think. At least you are able
to force a five-line combo on Windows! And that's what I miss. A function
where you can scale such things, as I stated in my original email.

> I'm not saying GTK+'s combo is perfect, but I think it is generally better
> than anything else I've seen.  At least it always uses all the screen space
> it has.

But this is one of my other objections: it merely _tries_ to use all the screen
space available. It draws the menu layout, but without all items: you have
to scroll them in if current selection item is near the beginning, using those
"scroll arrows". It's not the most economic handling of a selection. After all,
if you have no more items than would fit on the screen, it could have shown
the menu compleet, ie, showing all items at once (but would of course
require that
the current selected item may be located at a different height than the combo
widget itself, but tha'ts no problem to me. I even think that should
be configurable).

> The main problem, to me, is when the combo is too close to the screen edge,
> especially to the bottom one.  Then you can easily get a too small popup.

I'm happy you agree on this one :)

> And yes, I agree that a real scroll bar could be helpful.  While you should
> avoid presenting the user with a hundreds-items combo box in the first
> place, it doesn't mean GTK+ should make such combos even less usable.

I agree completely. Thanks for you comments.