Re: FYI: GtkText current design issues

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Derek Simkowiak <dereks@kd-dev.com> writes:

> > Have you looked at the Tk text widget? It seems to be very powerful,
> > so it might be worth emulating.
> 
> 	Thanks, I'll check it out.
> 
> 	Although, it's worth mentioning that (according to Owen) the
> design for the original GtkText was inspired by trying to *not* be like
> the Tk widget (because it uses 3 times as much memory as is necessary to
> hold the text).

Well, my comment was, more precisely, that the intention was to use
less memory than the Tk text widget, but I didn't think that had been
achieved very well, which indicated to me that the design had been
based on a false assumption. (That it was possible to have a less
memory-hungery text widget that had the necessary range of features 
and was sufficiently fast.)

My main concern about the Tk text widget is that it is a lot of quite
complicated code. I was scared off by that when I looked at it. I'm
also not completely sure that we really need a text widget as
comprehensive as the Tk one - with things like event bindings,
tags, embedded widgets, etc. I think there is a natural separation
between text widget and html widget, and the Tk text widget 
tries to do both in a sense. (Though it was designed pre-html.)

It isn't, I think, very compatible with what _I_ want to do for my
next text widget, which has a lot to do with internationalization,
but that is a completely separate issue.

Regards,
                                              Owen