Re: GtkTreeView discussion

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Shahms King <shahms shahms com> writes:

> >  * tooltips: I'd like to add support for custom tooltips of rows.  Also,
> >    I'd like a way to complete the current renderer if it doesn't fully
> >    fit.  Haven't thought this one fully through.
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this currently possible to do by
> writing your own CellRenderer? 
> Admittedly, it would be nice to have a GtkTooltipCellRenderer built in,
> but I'm just making sure it's possible to implement that way.  Doing
> this seems to fit in with TreeView model better than simply having tool
> tips be per-row.

No.  There's unfortunately no way right now for a cellrenderer to have a
tooltip.  

I would like very much to add them to the TreeView.  I've seen two types
of tooltips, that fulfill different use case.  The first is basically a
continuation of a row that doesn't fit on the screen.  It only appears
on cells that don't fully fit.  As a poor ascii example[1]:

| Short Row                           |
| This is a really long line in a row |
| ...                                 |

=>

| Short Row         |____________________
| This is a really l| ong line in a row ]
| ...               |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

here, the continuation appears in a window after a timeout.

The second approach is much more tooltip like.  You'd have a popup
description appear below the cell.  As another example:

| Short Row     |

[ This is a tooltip that appears after a timeout ]

I don't know if they're totally mutually exclusive or not.  I suppose
you could want both occasionally, but I'm concerned about confusing the
poor user (look at all these popups!)

Thanks,
-Jonathan the artist


[1] Hopefully everyone's mailer supports fixed width fonts. (-: