Re: Use GtkWidgets inside of a custom cell renderer

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

Gabriele Greco wrote:
> As subject says it's possibile?
>
> I've set up a custom cell renderer following the example in the treeview 
> tutorial, now I'd like to use some GTK objects inside it instead of 
> reinvent the wheel to draw lines and texts with GDK.
>
> The problem is that what I get in the render method of my subclass is 
> the treeview widget and a cell_area where to draw... there is a way to 
> force a widget to be drawn inside an area instead of being attached to 
> another widget?

Hi,
    The GtkWidget / GtkTreeView paradigms dont fit together
that easily, that is by design. GtkTreeView technology is designed
to be efficient to draw a list/tree of items, this way rows in
a treeview dont really take up any resources when they are not
visible (so you can easily have over 5000 items in a treeview without
slowing things down) - GtkWidgets own screen realestate and thus
cannot be packed into a treeview row.

I agree it might be interesting if an unparented GtkWidget could simply be
used as a rubber stamp on some input buffer though...
(practicly speaking though, gtk+ doesnt do this).

Cheers,
                      -Tristan