Re: Port to GTK+ and GNOME

[Ian Roxborough <irox@ix.netcom.com>]

gnocl does look syntactically nicer than tcl-gtk.  It would
be nice to have Tk wrapper commands that would for GTK, so
you get GTK without having to change a line of code, just 
import the gtk-tk wrapper at start up.

The SN screenshots probably got deleted when my {cygnus,redhat}.com/~irox
account got deleted.  It looked ok, only the custom listbox/tree
thing and the scrollbars where not themed, buttons looked a little
weird, but the nice part was I had only changed 12 lines of code
to get it working for the whole application.

The GTK 'feel' is probably going to be a little harder to obtain
than the look.  For the most part if you've got the look then
few people could tell the difference, this is probably because Tk
and GTK have some influence from grand daddy of UNIX GUI
toolkits, Motif.  But it is possible for themes to tweak the
'feel', also some themes require a different theme engine,
so just getting the look is probably not going to cut it.

As much as I don't like to say it, I'm not all that sure Tcl is
the right language for writing a GTK application.

Ian.

On Tue, 03 Dec 2002 18:32:29 -0500
Fernando Nasser <fnasser@redhat.com> wrote:

> Ian Roxborough wrote:
> > Hi Fernando,
> > 
> > I've looked at this problem a couple of times in the past.
> > 
> > tcl-gtk is an interesting project, I wrote a small test program to
> > see if it was worth using that for Source Navigator, but I felt that
> > I was loosing much of the benefits of tcl/tk and what should have
> > been a short program ended up being kind of long.  I've not used
> > tcl-gtk for a few years, so this might not still be an issue.
> > However, I feel the work involved in this would be similar to
> > writing the application.
> > 
> 
> Yes, the programming model is too different.
> 
> Have you looked at gnocl?  It tries to keep the Tk model as much as 
> possible.  This could make the porting easier...
> 
> 
> 
> > The solution I was really interested in trying to implement was to
> > add some sort of generic themeability to Tk, such that it would be
> > able understand GTK or Qt themes.  I actually got some parts working
> > and there where a couple of screen shots of SN running the AquaX
> > theme.  BLT has gone part of the way to providing some of functionality
> > needed, in particular the tiled widgets that allow bitmap backgrounds
> > on buttons, listboxes and other things.  Using BLT a writing a bitmap scaling
> > fuction so you can use scaled bitmap buttons should get you most of
> > the way there.  Of course not all themes are bitmaps so you might
> > want to use a theme engine to convert them to bitmaps as needed.
> > 
> 
> That is an interesting idea (at least for the "look" side of things). 
> Have you looked into Tk_Theme (by George Staplin)?  It has a 
> theme::frame and theme::label widgets.
> 
> Where are the SNav screen shots?  I would love to see them...
> 
> > I noticed a couple of ambiguities between the GTK and TK, but they where
> > minor things, like some widgets not having a boarder or not have a
> > disabled state.  I don't believe there is anything that would give too
> > much of a problem.
> > 
> 
> Probably less of a problem than trying to get the Windows look like was 
> done in the past ;-)
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks for you comments Ian.  Please if you can keep an eye on this 
> thread I would really appreciate.
> 
> Best regards,
> Fernando
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Fernando Nasser
> Red Hat Canada Ltd.                     E-Mail:  fnasser@redhat.com
> 2323 Yonge Street, Suite #300
> Toronto, Ontario   M4P 2C9
>