Re: filesel notes

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Dan Winship <danw ximian com> writes:
>
> > > h) Ability to use the native platform file selector for
> > >    GNOME/Win32/OSX/etc., or alternatively allow writing a
> > >    per-platform filesel that emulates the native one closely.
> > Allowing it to be replaced with a different Gtk-based file selector is
> > one thing, but using the OS's native file selector would just be a giant
> > UI wart. We don't use native widgets anywhere else, why here?
>
> Other toolkits do this, such as Qt and I think some less popular ones.
> I don't know the rationale. Perhaps emulating the platform UI
> precisely is difficult.
Also, the windows file selector seems to change with each revision of 
the operating system.  If you are going to emulate the native file 
dialog, which one do you choose?  Or do you reimplement each version and 
pick one at runtime?

> I don't understand why it would be a UI wart; users want us to fit in
> to the platform. I can imagine it being an API/implementation
> nightmare though. e.g. I don't know how we'd make a native filesel a
> GtkWidget/GtkWindow. Clearly we would need some clue as to how to
> implement this in order to proceed with this feature. I was hoping Tor
> and Hans might have thoughts. Probably we could make the API abstract
> enough that filesel isn't even necessarily a GtkWidget, but I don't
> know if it's worth it.
All the code using the common dialogs file selector under windows seems 
to just use the GetOpenFileName() or GetSaveFileName() APIs, which pops 
up the dialog modally, and then returns the selected file.  Don't know 
how you would fit this into the GTK model.

James.

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