Re: Sort indicators for columns in GtkTreeView

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Darin Adler <darin eazel com> writes:
> Both Evolution and Nautilus display arrows to indicate sort direction in the
> sorted column in their list views. (Using ETable in Evolution and a munged
> GtkCList in Nautilus.)
> 
> Is there some support for this in GtkTreeView? If so, is there a good way to
> make this themeable? In my opinion, it's not appropriate to draw the
> scroll-bar arrow in here (which is what ETable does), because I think of
> this as a sort-direction indicator, not a special kind of "arrow". But
> leaving my personal biases aside, what's the plan here for GtkTreeView?
> 

Tree view is just using GtkArrow now, plus it also does the color
shading of the sort column cells (copied from Nautilus). A theme
engine could override the appearance of the GtkArrow when inside a
tree view column; to make this easier we could call
gtk_widget_set_name() on these GtkArrows, then an RC file could even
affect things to some extent. To make it totally doable from an RC
file, we could add some style properties to GtkArrow (see
GtkOptionMenu and GtkButton for a couple examples of style properties)
that modified whatever needs modifying. Perhaps the style property
could change the detail passed to gtk_paint_arrow() by GtkArrow.

Style properties should allow nearly anything we want to be themeable
in a pretty clean way, I was adding them left and right yesterday.

Havoc