Reg. modifying GTK+ to add menu option



Hi all, 

I am Sindhu, a recent intern through the Outreach Program for Women 2013 for which I wrote user help for GNOME Terminal and GNOME Dictionary. I want to continue contributing to GNOME as part of Google Summer of Code, but my idea will require making some patches to GTK+.

My idea is that GNOME users would benefit from a right click menu option to look-up meanings of words right from inside their applications, without having to rely on external tools and websites. When user highlights a word, right clicks and selects "Look Up" option, the Popup bubble will show the definition adjacent to the text, making it distraction free and improving user productivity. This feature exists in OSX.

This is my first attempt at coding and am building a proof-of-concept of how the functionality will be from a user’s perspective, and to better explain what I am trying to do.

Screenshots: 

http://i.imgur.com/6QPBE7H.png

http://i.imgur.com/RzPRRms.png

Source: https://bitbucket.org/sindhus/gnome-look-up

I have also made a small patch to add a LookUp menu item to GTK+, which launches GNOME Dictionary with the selected word:

http://fpaste.org/PWms/

I want to add this to GTK+ because it will automatically benefit every GNOME Application, and have consistency for the user. I feel that the look-up context menu item makes sense to be enabled for the following Widgets:

GTKTextView
GTKEntry
GTKSourceView
GTKWebkit

I understand the implications of adding a new context menu item, which will affect GTK Applications on multiple platforms - some of which will not have support for GNOME Dictionary, so this functionality will be disabled by default. It can be an opt-in functionality on a per-application basis or activated globally during compile time (For distribution developers).

However, if the GTK Application Developers are aware of this functionality, and feel it benefits their Application’s users, then should be able to enable it easily.

Can you please answer my following questions:

1. Do you feel this is functionality is useful? (regardless of the path I proposed to accomplish it)
If yes, is there a more appropriate way of adding this functionality?

2. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on how this functionality could be achieved alternatively that is, without having to modify GTK+?

Thanks!


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