On Sun, 2010-01-24 at 13:13 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: > I have always disliked how GTK+'s API often leaks the concept of X > windows, often called just "windows", by which a GdkWindow is usually > implied. That's obviously confusing to people who think of windows as > top-level application windows, like GtkWindow. Certainly it's caused us great difficulty trying to explain the difference to people. If it had been named, well, anything other than "Window", it would have been helpful. We tend to use language like "get the underlying native resource" which of course doesn't mean anything, but at least isn't "Window". As Murray points out, this is all due to GDK [originally] being a thin wrapper around Xlib. The number of times I have seen people on gtk-list or in #gtk+ be told to go read the Xlib programming manual to understand what GdkEvents are is frustrating. I originally had the idea that using GTK would mean I didn't have to know much about X ir Xlib. I may have been wrong about that, but that's the impression I had. [The fact that GDK is heavily X inspired doesn't bother me; it's still an abstraction layer and does a fine job of it. It just seems that it leaks up into GTK a bit too much — notably all the GdkEvents in GtkWidget signals, and, as Murray raised, the very developer-visible existence of GdkWindow and GtkEventBox] AfC Sydney
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