Re: Replace context menu of GTK applications

[Simon Schneegans <code simonschneegans de>]

Am Mo 23 Apr 2012 20:54:35 CEST schrieb David NeÄas:
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 08:18:05PM +0200, Simon Schneegans wrote:
> > I asked this question on another mailing list. There I got the hint
> > to ask here, maybe you can help me!
> >
> > I'm going to write my bachelor thesis on different menu types (e.g.
> > Pie Menus). For this reason I'd like to replace the context menu of
> > GTK applications (the menu opened by right-clicking). I don't want
> > to recompile those applications, some kind of plugin technique would
> > be awesome!
> >
> > I thought of two possible approaches:
> >
> > 1. - I know it's possible to do this with the main application menu
> > (like all the different global menus are doing it).
> >      - So here's my question: Is that possible for context menus as
> > well? Is there an API for this purpose? If so, what's the way to go?
> > Documentation on this topic is very sparse...
> >
> > 2. - Write a GTK module and try to do it with some GObject
> > fancyness. May this work?
>
> GtkMenuFoo classes use a number of internal Gtk+ calls and might not be
> reasonably replaceable from outside.  So I suggest to simply change the
> implementation of menus in Gtk+ source code, recompile it and let
> programs use your modified Gtk+ (by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH).  This is
> trivial compared to your suggestions.  In any case, you may run into
> some implicit assertions in the programs about how menus work.
>
> Also, there is no fundamental difference between application, context
> and whatever else menus.  They are all GtkMenu widgets and programs may
> actually use a single GtkMenu object in different places.
>
> Yeti

Thanks for your reply! I'll try to go this way.

Just one more question: I compiled GTK 3.4.1 from source and made some 
programs use this library. Everything works as supposed, just the 
appearance of the applications is a bit odd; they don't follow the 
theme set for my user account. They look a bit like win95 used to look.

What may be the reason for this behaviour? Is there some configuration 
needed? On my system exactly the same version of GTK is installed...

Thanks,
Simon