Re: gtk3 (GtkTextView) and MacOS

[Roger Davis <rbd soest hawaii edu>]

Hi all,

So I finally have my problem fully solved for now, and here is a summary 
of the pertinent points. Beware that some of this may only apply to the 
MacPorts install of gtk3, I have no experience with any other type of gtk3 
install on MacOS.

(1) I had to set my XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable to a directory of 
my own creation containing the file gtk-3.0/settings.ini. The contents of 
the latter are

[Settings]
gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme = false
gtk-theme-name = Adwaita
gtk-icon-theme-name = Adwaita
gtk-font-name = Cantarell 12

Use the gtk-font-name to specify a font name and size of your choice, but 
the named font must be MacOS-managed, not X11/fontconfig-managed! Meaning, 
if you were to open up the MacOS FontBook app you should see it listed 
there.

You may be able to set XDG_CONFIG_HOME to any gtk3-installed theme 
directory, e.g., /opt/local/share/themes/HighContrast, but whatever font 
is being used by that theme (or by default) must be similarly 
MacOS-managed.

(2) If you want to use a font that is not already managed by MacOS (e.g., 
Cantarell or any other gtk-ish font not already available in native 
MacOS), you must install it in one of two ways. You can use FontBook as 
recommended by many web sources, but I could not find any way to install 
my fonts in that manner so as to be visible to all userIDs. To do the 
latter I had to manually use the Finder to drag the desired .ttf file(s) 
into /Library/Fonts. See http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201722 for more 
information.

(3 -- Free Bonus!) Unless you are using a direct gtk-on-Quartz 
implementation (in which case, please tell me if that's working well and, 
if so, how you made it so), you will very likely be using the XQuartz X11 
server. I have been having intermittent problems with XQuartz startup when 
invoking various X11 clients, the problem being that occasionally X11 
windows are mapped to the display in an unmanaged state (meaning without 
the MacOS window titlebar and its close/iconify/etc. buttons and with no 
way to move the window anywhere else on the display). This does not happen 
often but it's far from rare. When it does happen, it takes XQuartz a 
*very* long time to start (tens of seconds). This problem has been 
reported by other users but I have never seen any clear fix, and I have 
seen one fix that did not work for me at all (changing a Mission Control 
setting). In my case (and probably all the others), the quartz-wm window 
manager either died or was just never started. Fortunately for me at 
least, however, I have so far been able to fix this problem just by 
manually (re?)starting the window manager with

        % quartz-wm &

May my luck continue and yours be as good, because this is a truly 
annoying problem!

I hope others find these tips helpful, and thanks again to the list 
members who helped me grope my way to these solutions!

Roger