The widget behind the new preferences implementation in Builder was pretty fun to write. Some of the details were tricky, so I thought I’d make the widget reusable in case others would like to use it. I’m sure you can find uses for something like this.
The widget allocates space for children based on their priority. However, instead of simply growing in one direction, we allocate vertically, but spill over into an adjacent column as necessary. This gives the feeling of something akin to GtkFloxBox, but without the rigidity of aligned rows and columns.
This widget is meant to be used within a GtkScrolledWindow (well GtkViewport really) where the GtkScrolledWindow:hscrollbar-policy is set to GTK_POLICY_NEVER.
The resulting work is called EggColumnLayout and you can find it with all the other Egg hacks.
A short description of the tune-ables are:
EggColumnLayout:column-width tunes the width of the columns. These are uniform among all columns so you should set it to something reasonable. The default is 500px. As an aside, dynamically descovering the column width uniform to all children would probably not look great, nor be straight-forward.
EggColumnLayout:column-spacing is the spacing between columns. Had we used children containers, we could have probably done this in CSS, but the property is “good enough” in my opinion.
EggColumnLayout:row-spacing is the analog to :column-spacing but for the space between the bottom of one child and the top of a subsequent child.
That is pretty much it. Just add your children to this and put the whole thing in a GtkScrolledWindow.
Happy Hacking.