Re: Gtk::Text widget

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

James William Carlson <jcarlson@stanford.edu> writes:
>   I just read that the Text widget doesn't support horizontal 
> scrollbars.  Is this something that's being worked on, or is
> a permanent deficiency?  On a related note, do you (that is,
> experienced Gtk programmers) feel that the Text widget is 
> appropriate for implementing a truly full featured text
> editing environment?  Have their been any independent attempts
> to develop alternate Text widgets for Gtk?
> 

GtkText is getting tossed; we have a replacement in the next version
of GTK. GtkText will continue to exist in the next version, but it
will suck just as badly as it does now, and everyone should use the
new widget. The new widget is probably sufficient for writing a really
nice Unicode-enabled text editor. GtkText certainly is not.

There are various alternate widgets people have done in the meantime
to work around GtkText sucking, such as GtkExText; look around on
freshmeat.net and you can probably find these. Most editors written in
GTK use one of them.

You can try the new text widget by installing the GTK 1.3.1 preview
release that just came out; it comes with a small app "testtext" that
demonstrates the new widget.

The new widget is quite snazzy, based on a review of Java, Tk, Qt,
etc. this widget has more features and flexibility than any text
widget except for the Java widget, and the extra features in the Java
widget are probably overboard.

Note though that you can't base a stable application on the new widget
until the next GTK comes out, and that won't be for a couple months at
least.

Havoc