Re: GtkComobBox with appears-as-list - broken? going away?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

you probably wanted to send you email to gtk-devel-list.

On 13 December 2016 at 20:08, Ian Puleston <ian underpressuredivers com> wrote:

The "big blank area" is meant to ensure that the first item in the
list is close to the location of the pointer; the "appears-as-list"
style property was mostly a hack with pretty serious side effects in
the overall maintainability of the GtkComboBox widget.

> Then in searching for info about this I came across a commit just last month
> saying “combobox: Remove appears-as-list style property. Remove all the code
> handling the appears-as-list=TRUE case”.

In general, style properties are going away in GTK+ 4.x, if they
cannot be replaced by CSS properties.

In the specific case of GtkComboBox, though, the "appears-as-list"
style property was literally used to create a separate widget that
responded to the GtkComboBox API, which is even worse.

We're looking into creating a new "combo box" widget for GTK+ 4.x,
which will likely be styled as a pop over; see, for example, this:

  https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2014-December/msg00025.html

and the relative branch: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/log/?h=wip/combo

and designs: 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/theming/widgets/combobox-replacements.png

> So is this style property known to be not working in GTK-3? And is that the
> reason that it is being removed, or something else? Will it be removed in
> GTK-3 or not until GTK-4?

GTK+ 3.x is feature and API frozen; no new API, no new features, only
bug fixes and deprecation warnings are going to be allowed from now
on; so, the "appears-as-list" style property will still work.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]