Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Andy Piper]

At 09:27 AM 4/19/02 -0700, Brady Montz wrote:
> 1. actual widgets, with an abstraction layer that allows a single lisp
>    spec of them to work on multiple backends - gtk, qt, cocoa,
>    vt100. This might restrict them to be fairly simple, but that's not
>    necessarily a bad thing. I think speedbar and customize are good
>    examples of us straining against the limits of text.

So we actually have this in XEmacs. Its not complete, it has rough edges, 
but its a start. It would be great if we could come up with a standard lisp 
API (common to both XEmacs and Emacs) for doing this sort of stuff. For 
instance this is the XEmacs search dialog:

(defun make-search-dialog ()
  "Popup a search dialog box."
  (interactive)
  (let ((parent (selected-frame)))
    (make-dialog-box
     'general
     :parent parent
     :title "Search"
     :spec
     (setq search-dialog
           (make-glyph
            `[layout
              :orientation horizontal :justify left
              ;; neither the following height/width nor the identical one
              ;; below should be necessary! (see below)
              :height 11 :width 40
              :border [string :data "Search"]
              :items
              ([layout :orientation vertical :justify left
                       :items
                       ([string :data "Search for:"]
                        [button :descriptor "Match Case"
                                :style toggle
                                :selected (not case-fold-search)
                                :callback (setq case-fold-search
                                                (not case-fold-search))]
                        [button :descriptor "Regular Expression"
                                :style toggle
                                :selected search-dialog-regexp
                                :callback (setq search-dialog-regexp
                                                (not search-dialog-regexp))]
                        [button :descriptor "Forwards"
                                :style radio
                                :selected search-dialog-direction
                                :callback (setq search-dialog-direction t)]
                        [button :descriptor "Backwards"
                                :style radio
                                :selected (not search-dialog-direction)
                                :callback (setq search-dialog-direction nil)]
                        )]
               [layout :orientation vertical :justify left
                       :items
                       ([edit-field :width 15 :descriptor "" :active t
                                    :face default :initial-focus t]
                        [button :width 10 :descriptor "Find Next"
                                :callback-ex
                                (lambda (image-instance event)
                                  (search-dialog-callback ,parent
                                                          image-instance
                                                          event))]
                        [button :width 10 :descriptor "Cancel"
                                :callback-ex
                                (lambda (image-instance event)
                                  (isearch-dehighlight)
                                  (delete-frame
                                   (event-channel event)))])])]))
     ;; neither this height/width nor the identical one above should
     ;; be necessary! (in fact, if you omit the one above, the layout
     ;; sizes itself correctly; but the frame as a whole doesn't use
     ;; the layout's size, as it should.)
     :properties '(height 11 width 40))))

andy