Turn off GTK+ warnings

[Stuart Longland <stuartl longlandclan id au>]

Hi all,

This has been a major bug bear of mine (probably by far my biggest pet
hate of GTK+), and while I've seen hacks around the problem, I haven't
found a way to properly resolve this.

I use a number of GTK+ applications and a good number of them spew out
crap (from my perspective as a non-dev) on stderr like this:

> (gvim:3954): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkNotebook 0x55d2306291f0 is mapped but visible child GtkEventBox 
> 0x55d23062b1c0 is not mapped

As I say, it isn't just `gvim`, I've seen it with numerous applications.
 It is dependent on the application, the theme, and numerous other
influences.  The only thing in common is the widget set; GTK+.

As it happens though, I am a **user** of these applications.
I am not the **developer** of these applications.

These Warnings Are Not My Problem!  I Do Not Care To See Them!

The messages are actually harmful as I often launch tools like `gvim`
from a terminal session, and thus writing to `stderr` means my shell
prompt is buried under 50 lines of GTK+ warnings that I have nothing to
do with.

If I were to be writing a GTK+ application, sure, I should be turning on
any and all debugging facilities so that I can track such bugs and fix them.

As a user though, they greatly annoy me and interfere with my work.
When I come to write software, I have been reluctant to use GTK+ because
I don't want to inflict this kind of annoyance on my users.

I feel these warnings should be off by default, and only turned on if
someone declares a configuration parameter in their GTK+ configuration
or sets an environment variable.

The developers who care will turn the flag on and life proceed as
before.  Those that don't care will continue to ignore it as they are
doing already.  The users, can leave the flag turned off, and enjoy a
peaceful user experience in their console sessions.

In fact, as a developer, I'd probably find it more useful to log these
to a file.  It'd be pretty easy for a test suite to set up redirection
to a file and look for such messages: fail the test if the file is not
empty after a run.

How, as a user, do I go about silencing these warnings?
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
  ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.