Re: Gtk tabs in emacs, new branch.

[Jan Djärv]

David De La Harpe Golden skrev:
> Jan Djärv wrote:
> > I just tested it, you can have zero sized widgets in the tab.  But 
> > there are borders the Gtk+ widget expects to draw around its 
> > children.  This now comes at the top, A minor issue.  I'll see if I 
> > can simplify my implementation with this approach.
> >
> >     Jan D.
>
> Should make interior tabs easier to implement too. hmm.
>
> So, I was wondering just how firefox tabs did their thing given the 
> quirks of a naive gtk notebook instance.  People here are quite likely 
> already aware of this:
>
> Mozilla XUL's "native gtk" theme engine doesn't really use the
> notebook widget directly at all for its "tabbox" (or other gtk widgets 
> directly for most anything else...)!
>
> It apparently makes an examplar singleton instance of each widget then 
> borrows their (GtkStyle) style  members to pass to 
> gtk_(paint|draw|style)_* functions to handle drawing lookalikes more 
> flexibly itself.
>
> You can see the idea in the mozilla sources:
> http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/widget/src/gtk2/gtk2drawing.c

It is a clever hack, but I don't fancy drawing tabs "manually", handling 
drag&drop, memory allocations and so on.  It is a big job.

> http://www.gtk.org/api/2.6/gtk/GtkStyle.html

Actually 2.6 is quite old, we even require 2.10 for Emacs.  2.20 is current.

> This apparently includes scrollbars - maybe a way around gtk's scrollbar
> quirks...
>
> Though recasting "gtk" emacs to use the approach throughout might be 
> ...a lot of work...

And kind of meaningless to use a toolkit in the first place.  The widgets are 
supposed to simplify things after all.

        Jan D.