Gtk feature requests

[falconer falconer best vwh net]

Hi all; I just saw that gtk 2 is coming out soon.  It's probably
too late for 2.0, but could I get folks to consider the following
features for a future release?  These comments stem from frustrations
I encountered while developing under gtk.

Most of these could be considered bug reports rather than changes
to the API.


  * Toolkit should recognize traditional "-g WxH+X+Y" commandline
    arguments.

  * It would be very handy to be able to somehow specify the
    width of a TextEntry widget in terms of displayed characters
    instead of pixels.  I just want the option of creating a text
    entry that displays 10 characters, or whatever.
    Currently, I use a utility function which I wrote which converts
    en-spaces to pixels, but it can't account for the widget's
    internal margins, etc.

  * Scrollbars and scales desperately need a way for callbacks to
    differentiate a scroll-in-progress from a scroll-completed type
    event.  I would suggest a "value-done" signal to supplement
    the "value" event.  (Example: a cad program that takes a long
    time to rebuild the display.  I want to scroll it without
    rebuilding while the user manipulates the scroll bar, and then
    do the rebuild when the user releases the mouse.)

  * It would be nice to add a scale factor option to sliders and
    scrollbars so that a large mouse motion results in a small
    change in slider position (very useful feature when dealing
    with very small sliders.  See

	http://www.efalk.org/Widgets/#slider

    for an example of one I wrote for the X intrinsics many years
    ago.

  * It would be nice for TextEntry widgets to have signals which
    indicate that the widget has received/lost keyboard focus.
    This is especially important when losing focus, as this is
    a good time for the application to validate and/or reformat
    the input.

  * It would be nice to have an option for TextEntry widgets to
    select their contents when gaining focus (although this could
    be done manually given a focus-received signal.)

  * I found the toolkit's habit of highlighting the widget under the
    cursor rather than highlighting the widget with keyboard focus
    to be confusing.

  * It would be a nice feature to add "focus follows mouse" to the
    keyboard focus mechanism.  That is, moving the mouse from widget
    to widget would change the focus without needing to click on
    the new widget.  The tab keys would still change the focus as
    before.  (I implemented this in my XawM toolkit, see
    http://www.efalk.org/Widgets/#xawm)

  * Buttons should provide visual feedback when activated from keyboard
    (i.e. button-pressed on key down, button-released on key up.)

  * It would be nice to be able to expand/collapse tree widgets with
    the +/- keys.

  * It would be nice if I could use my own select loop with gtk;
    something like:

	gtkfd = gtk_get_connection_id() ;
		:
	select(nfds, &readfds, ...))
		:
	if( FD_ISSET(gtkfd, &readfds) )
	{
	  while( GtkPeekEvent() )
	    GtkDispatchEvent() ;
	}



-ed falk