Re: patch and questions

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi Stefano!

On Sat, 22 Jan 2011 10:51:11 +0100, Stefano Teso wrote:

> - Considering the better theme-ability of GtkIconView (as exposed by
> some themes, e.g., Clearlooks Revamp), I was wondering whether it
> would be useful to port nautilus from it's own (eel-based) custom
> thing to GtkIconView. The idea would be to subclass GtkIconView to
> implement filename editing, etc. Using a GtkListView (for the list
> view, as it already is) and a GtkIconView (for the icon/compact 
> views)
> would perhaps allow for the same data model to be used in both cases
> and simpler code. (Just a guess, I don't really have much experience
> with GTK.) Is there any deep technical reason why nautilus doesn't 
> use
> the stock GtkIconView widget, or just lack of resources? Am I missing
> something obvious?

Having a GtkIconView-based NautilusIconView is indeed a good and 
worthwhile goal, which would also allow nautilus to drop some thousand 
lines of quite complex code, which is always nice...
I think the most important feature now missing from GtkIconView is 
manual layouting of items in the canvas [1], which is currently allowed 
in every Nautilus' icon view (and would still be a requirement for the 
desktop icons, even if we removed the feature for regular windows). I 
don't know whether that's desirable for GtkIconView to allow that 
though, but maybe it'd be possible to use a custom GtkCellArea 
implementation, which I haven't investigated yet.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528127

Thanks,

Cosimo