Re: [XBoard-devel] gtk update

[h . g . muller]

Thanks to the .INF driver Arun dug up for me, the wireless problem in
Ubuntu 10.04 is now fully fixed! (Using it with ndiswrapper.) So I am back
in business.

So what is the planned path to the GTK porting now? After the Engine #N
Settings is ported, most dialogs and auxiliary windows should work in GTK.
It would leave:

Engine Output
Move History
Game List Tags
Main window

I want to start working on the Move History, to make it WinBoard style.
This should result in a completely front-end-free implementation, which I
then also want to put into the X-version development branch.

Then I would probably want to try my hand at some modest GTK stuff, to see
if I can enhance the GTK port of the generic popup to also do the Engine
Output window. (This would require equipping Label options with some
formatting info in currently unused fields of their Option struct, that
will cause them to be displayed with specified size on the same line,
rather than always taking on the full width of the dialog, and panes to be
stacked rather than displayed side by side, under control of an extra
modifier bit in the break option. These should be very easy changes.)

That leaves the Game list Tags (about which I am not yet decided), and the
main window.

We could throw out the promotion menu completely. At first I thought it
would have to stay in for the benefit of the JAWS version, but the easiest
way for blind people to enter moves is to type them (which requires far
fewer keystrokes than indicating from- and to-square with the keyboard
arrows), and in that case they might as well type the promotion piece. The
drop menu is also deprecated, now we display holdings. Only the piece menu
might still be of importance to the blind to set up a position; but I
think it would be just as easy for them if I replace it with a keystroke
that would upgrade or downgrade the piece on the currently selected
square, reading out the new name. To them that would basically be exactly
the same behavior as using the arrow key to step through a menu, and have
the screen reader say the items.

Can the changes that have been done in xboard.c for the plain GTK version
be easily transferred to the gtk-xt version? I don't recall I did that
many changes in xboard.c. (I did move some drawing-initialization code
around to put it in separate subroutines, to make it callable during a
session, though, for the benefit of the Board Options dialog.)