Re: Is there a developer wiki for gtk?

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Stevie Griffiths
<stevie craig griffiths gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
> Does such a developer wiki exist?
>
> (note I think the API documentation and API is good, mostly)
>
> I've been feeling frustrated every time I want to learn something new with
> GTK.  I write apps mostly on my own, with internet access on my mobile,
> where downloading the source of other apps to understand what they did
> feels like an unreasonable expectation.
>
> I want to create a visually grouped set of buttons without writing a new
> widget, similar to what's been appearing in other gtk apps and has been
> used in native mac apps for some time.
>
> I feel unsure if it is possible on one hand and on the other I feel it
> should be a simple matter of overwriting just a small number of style
> elements and defining a left, middle and right button and adjusting the
> padding, margins and how the corners are drawn.
>
> Everytime I want to learn something new with GTK I end up feeling
> frustrated at how hard I have to work to learn something simple.  I don't
> want to constantly ask people I don't know how to do things when I feel
> there responses are thoughtless, cruel, unkind and often useless (just to
> be careful I've never used this list before I think, however I still feel
> wary of it). Even when in many cases I feel I have done the hard work and
> generally know the subject matter better.
>
> (I love dealing with people, but you hit the internet and it feels like
> everyone becomes nasty)
>
> If there was an official wiki I'd want to give up hours of time, updating
> it and providing what knowlege I posess because I want something
> centralised, refined and solid to refer too learn or re-learn what I
> forget.  So far as I can tell and I may be wrong it's just not there.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to read and I want to be careful and say
> thankyou for any effort to improving GTK in any way you have made, I feel
> grateful and (mostly) enjoy using it.

Hi,
    Please feel free to ask newbie or advanced questions on this list.

I have found this list very helpful over the years, when I started using this
list it was much much more of an "elitist" society of RTFM-like responses.

Remember that nobody is required to respond to questions (I dont know
of any paid positions for that sort of thing, it's all volunteer work).

If you ask a question that sounds like a demand, you will certainly get
a cold response if you get any response at all, because as I mentioned
above, anyone who answers your question is doing it on their own time.

A clear subject line is always very important, sometimes even finding
the right way to form your question will give you the answer before
sending the email (in my first years I can remember discarding almost
half of my emails which were just questions which I had not yet phrased
properly).

Showing/proving that you have done your part of the research and have hit
a dead-end helps to earn you sympathy points.

For your particular question about those "MacOS button-group-thingies",
those are implemented in GTK+-3 using CSS.

I can't tell you the exact details because I have not used that exact feature
myself.

I expect that it works specifically for GtkButtons inside a GtkButtonBox,
the GtkButtonBox will apply pseudo classes to the first and last of its
children (allowing you to style them differently, i.e. with the round endings).

So, all you need to do is find out if it is indeed the GtkButtonBox which
implements this pseudo-classing of it's children, or if it can be done with
a simple GtkBox... then you need to find out the actual name of the
pseudo-class (i.e. is it called "first-child" and "last-child" ?).

Finally you need to cook up the right css to say that "first-child" children
of a "GtkButtonBox" get a specific style (probably you will provide a 9-slice
image for that).

Good luck and welcome to our friendly list.

Cheers,
          -Tristan