Inplace Tips for GtkTreeView (#346992)

["Michael Urman" <murman gmail com>]

Hello all.

I've put together a demo-ready patch for a feature I would like to see
available in GTK+, and am looking for guidance on how to proceed. If
it is deemed potentially worth including into GTK+, I am willing to do
the code work to make it production-ready, especially if I can get
some assistance. If there's no chance of it going in, I don't want to
waste my time.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346992

In short the feature pops up a small window that looks like a tooltip
under the cursor when it hovers over a cell that is either partially
concealed by a scrolled window, or has been shortened due to text
ellipsization. Because it is directly under the cursor, unlike a
normal tooltip, button and keyboard events must be relayed to the
underlying treeview. I've used a similar but external python hack and
find I miss it in other apps.

I put a movie demoing this (including current implementation bugs) at
http://www.tortall.net/~mu/inplace-tips-346992.ogg in case applying
and finding an app to test the patch is difficult.

I'm looking for the following:
* Confirmation that it's worth the time to complete the patch, or
confirmation that it would be wasted time.
* If it's worth the time, pointers to documentation on how to
properly handle reference counting in GTK+ so the code can be made
production-ready.
* Optionally someone to champion the process of getting this into
GTK+, or someone else who wants to complete the patch.
* Any comments on how to improve the behavior or the code.

I've gotten only a tepid response in IRC, so I'm trying to figure out
if that's due to disinterest, lack of time, or lack of exposure.

Thanks,
Michael
--
Michael Urman  http://www.tortall.net/mu/blog