Category: Technology

This is one of the final installments on the GtkCellArea TreeView refactoring saga, we’re having a GTK+ team on Tuesday where we’ll discuss this and other various things and finally, land the beast that is GtkCellArea.

Actually as a passing note, the GTK+ team meeting this week is potentially the last one we’re going to have before freezing GTK+ 3.0 apis. If there are glitches, problems, polishing work for GTK+ that you know is important and requires breaking API/ABI, it would be a good idea to present your issues at this meeting.

This is a bit of a surprise post I was not planning on writing but I was surprised by the success of the icon view refactoring work so I thought it would be a good idea to share this here.

Bonus GtkIconView Refactor

I’m pleased to say that the refactored GtkIconView actually works much better than the old icon view, all in ~1700 less lines of code.

A small example of this (without showing off configurable cell alignments and the potential of adding some custom GtkCellArea to your icon view to lay cells out in more custom ways) is already viewable in the tests/testiconview test.

It seems that the former icon view did not handle horizontal layout of cells very well:

As you can see the cells in this icon view are not aligned, the effect is “yuck”. However this was not noticeable when using a typical GtkIconView with only a constant size pixbuf on the left and variable length text on the right, the “yuck” starts to show through when using variably sized cell renderers on the left followed by more, unaligned renderers.

The new Icon View test in the same configuration:

Now all cells are correctly aligned horizontally no matter the size of leading cells.

You’ll have to just trust and forgive me for “Icon 5” and “Icon 6”, it actually does not appear that way. Only when using the screenshot tool and releasing the selected area it causes a rerender of the GtkIconView… it seems the screen capture is performed before the widget has time to finish re-rendering itself.

And that’s not all

The GtkIconView still doesn’t handle progressive calculation of rows like GtkTreeView does (it calculates the sizes of all icons in one go, sorry this refactor did not change that, we still have to take care of that).

However I was curious about the performance difference so I inserted a GTimer into the GtkIconView layouting procedure, which was pretty easy to analyze (since it does everything in one pass, it was pretty easy to compare).

Before refactoring (that is, requesting the size of each GtkCellRenderer individually and doing some complex calculations about where each renderer is placed inside the “icon” or “item”) I got these results:

• After adding 10,000 items to the same test (that’s what the “Add Many” button does), the former icon view took 6.225222 seconds to initially layout the newly added items.
• With the new icon view (after refactoring), adding the same 10,000 rows took 3.492693 seconds.

Once the sizes are initially requested for newly added rows processing is a bit cheaper, however the whole icon view needs to be relayed out every time it gets a new allocation.

With the old code, in my console after resizing the window pane (with > 10,000 items) I got:

relayout took 3.142941 seconds
relayout took 3.150152 seconds
relayout took 3.149025 seconds

With the new code for the same items I got:

relayout took 1.252735 seconds
relayout took 1.339084 seconds
relayout took 1.313939 seconds
relayout took 1.287726 seconds

So in conclusion, not only does the new icon view render cells with better alignments, not only does it do so in 1700 less lines of code… it also calculates the cell positions and lays out the icons in literally half the time it took with the old icon view code.

The icon view refactor work is now ready after ~2 days of work and available on the icon-view-refactor branch.

Enjoy !

This is another installment on the GtkTreeView refactoring saga. We’ve come a really long way with this and have the first phase of GtkTreeView rework almost 100% complete.

I’ve been working around the clock with our treeview master Kristian Rietveld, who worked out the initial integration of GtkCellArea into GtkTreeViewColumn and has been reviewing my patches against the treeview code every chance he gets… I know it’s been hard to keep up between meetings and other obligations but really, thanks a lot for your help on this Kris !

Some of the good news is:

• GtkCellArea as an abstract class opens up the road for eventually more implementations, for instance tabular cell areas or areas that embed widgets can be developed and then used directly by GtkIconView, GtkTreeView, GtkComboBox classes without any need to change code in those classes.
• GtkCellLayout widgets only need to interface with a single GtkCellArea instead of manage a list of cells, GtkCellLayout only requires that a layouting widget implement the GtkCellLayoutIface->get_area() virtual method and then does everything under the hood on the layouting widget’s behalf (this helps to remove lots of code from lots of classes).
• GtkCellArea provides “cell properties” to define the relationship of GtkCellRenderers inside their area. Using this generic interface (just like GtkContainer “child properties”) GtkCellLayout’s GtkBuildable implementation implements a <cell-packing> custom tag and allows cell properties to be defined from the GtkBuilder UI format. (something we’ve been missing for a long time is a way to specify which cells “expand” in a GtkTreeViewColumn from GtkBuilder format).
• Since GtkCellArea provides a generic way for handling events, and since recent developments of GtkWidget (i.e. widgets can be “drawn” and can be rendered ofscreen and such), its possible to implement a GtkCellArea subclass that contains and renders widgets (which can even handle events).
• Also, GtkCellArea handles the driving of focus from renderer to renderer inside an area (as well as the painting of focus on the renderers), further reducing the workload of cell layouting widgets.
• Finally, GtkTreeViewColumn has been reworked to replace it’s management of GtkCellRenderers with a single abstract GtkCellArea (not to mention, GtkTreeViewColumn struct members are now safely in a private data structure and GtkTreeView and Column code have a much cleaner “split”).

Some of the bad news is:

• GtkCellArea replicates lots of api. For instance “cell properties” would really be GContainer child properties if we were to have a GContainer interface, “focus navigation” could really be implemented as a GtkFocusable interface that might not be a GtkWidget and finally even event handling could be implemented as a GtkEventable interface of sorts. However, after doing all of this and actually getting it to work, I dont think this api replication is such a bad deal. A GContainer interface providing child packing properties and object hierarchy outside of the GtkWidget hierarchy is something I’ve wanted for a long time however it’s just not exactly what I’ve been working on these days.
• Another disappointment is that GtkTreeView has not been fully reworked to harness the power of the new height-for-width apis yet. We preferred a safer and more conservative development procedure for GtkTreeView: dump all the cell renderer man-handling in favor of an abstract GtkCellArea first and then leverage the height-for-width apis afterwards once we know everything is working.

Ideally I wanted GtkTreeView to actually calculate and allocate rows “height-for-width” with wrapping text and the works, all in one go but I also think it’s wise to do this stuff in comprehensible iterations… at least the framework is here and we don’t need to break any more api/abi at this point.

However, that being said, here’s a peek at some of the new things that are already possible with the new and improved GtkTreeView code without adding any fancy GtkCellArea subclasses or actually doing the height for width geometry.

Configurable Cell Alignments:

To show off cell alignments (and test some inner workings) I’ve updated a test that we already have in gtk+, here’s a look at the good old ./tests/testtreeedit in tact and as we are used to seeing it:

Ok nothing new here, moving along, for completeness sake (and just to express what exactly is “configurable” in terms of cell alignments), let’s look at an ugly configuration that no-one is likely to use:

Well, that’s an ugly configuration sure, but sometimes unaligned cells can be useful.

Here’s an example of how an unaligned cell can be more useful:

Ahh this is much better, I’ve always been annoyed at the alignment space between a variable length text renderer and an icon that logically belongs with the text. In this case we can have an icon that is “related” to the variable length text placed nicely to the right of it without any undesired space.

Vertically Oriented GtkCellAreaBox:

That’s right, vertically stacked cells inside a GtkTreeViewColumn was not possible before this. If you’ve used the popular bit torrent client “transmission”, you will find that they’ve achieved a similar look to the above image by way of implementing a custom cell renderer for their needs. With GtkCellAreaBox we should be able to cover most any desirable layout of cells inside an area without any custom code needed (with a GtkCellAreaTable, we can probably cover any conceivable layout that the user might desire without the need for any custom code).

Documentation:

Now that I’m tidying up and trying to close all of this work I’ve been doing over the past 2 months I’m doing the polish work and writing loads of documentation. The bulk of the documentation is not pertinent to users as it tries to discuss how GtkCellLayout widgets actually work (unless GTK+ users are into writing custom treeviews and the like, of course). Nevertheless having the documentation is probably a good step to help us keep track of how things are done inside GTK+.

• Documentation for the GtkCellArea itself (the bulk of the documentation).
• Documentation for GtkCellAreaContext (a context to store geometrical details for a collection of rows).
• Documentation for GtkCellAreaBox (the first cell area implementation, an orientable box area).
• Documentation for the GtkTreeMenu (GtkComboBox now delegates it’s menu related work to this new class, which I showed off already in previous posts).

Since the deadline for landing these new apis is getting dangerously close, I hope to land them very soon and then move on to giving GtkTreeView (and GtkIconView) real height-for-width capabilities afterwards, as this part wont need to entail any API breakage.

Coming up up next: Episode “lets land this code” and then the season finale, Episode “Height for width icon views and treeviews”.

Stay tuned 😉

This is the next installment on the subject of GtkCellArea hacking (which I introduced last week).

After a raw struggle with GtkComboBox and some final brain-wracking problem solving I was able to finally deliver a new and improved GtkComboBox with much more flexibility in terms of rendering cells.

Of course you’ve all seen what GtkTreeMenu does last week, so there’s not much left to show… except I did have to do a bit of problem solving to make sure it renders properly when cells are oriented vertically as well, even when their height is not fixed over a collection of GtkTreeModel rows (or, menu items).

The end compromise is that cell alignments (i.e. particularly the alignments of cells relative to the same cells in adjacent rows) can only be done when the collection of rows have a fixed size in the said orientation. If that’s not clear enough, take for example a treeview; in a treeview column every row gets the same width… in this case it’s possible to align cells with the same cell’s position above and below it in adjacent rows. However if the column cells are oriented vertically, space is not reserved vertically to match the space used in rows above and below… that can only be done if the treeview is set to use a fixed row height. (actually, it would be technically possible to do where only the last cell defines the difference in height, but that would be very tricky both for the GtkCellArea to handle as well as for the calling GtkTreeView widget, for reasons I wont get into in this post, in the end I think its a very logical tradeoff).

So, here’s some illustration of the combo box in action, delegating a large portion of the work to GtkTreeMenu.

GtkComboBox using GtkTreeMenu using GtkCellArea

For convenience sake, instead of adding lots of code to testcombo.c I just added a combo-box reflecting the same model and cell area already defined in testtreemenu:

Note in this shot that the combo box is taller than the contents but is still at it’s minimum size. This was always a requirement because the combo box should not start changing size depending on what item is selected (of course). However now instead of some jumbled iterative code in gtkcombobox.c, this is achieved by telling the cellview it packs onto itself to “fit-model”. The GtkCellView in turn assumes the job of properly requesting enough space to fit the entire GtkTreeModel for any selection it might receive.

Heres another basic shot with another row selected (with the tallest / longest wrapping text):

This row constitutes the tallest size for the combo box and is the reason for requesting so much space. Note that since we’ve set the third cell to “align” with adjacent cells, there is a gap between the second and third cell (Actually if you fire the test up yourself you will find the effect quite nice when using keynav or mouse scroller to navigate through items, since the last cell always stays aligned with previously shown selections).

But the part that hurt my brain the most to get right was…

Vertically stacked Cells

In the case of vertically stacked cells, alignments only work on the GtkCellView that is displayed on top of the combo box. Since the GtkCellView on top needs to request enough space for any row in the model, it can afford to allocate a fixed height to the underlying GtkCellArea which does the rendering (i.e. the height used to display every row of data is a constant height).

However a compromise is made for the menu items, since they naturally use a different height for every menu item the alignments are thrown away and ignored (expand space is also irrelevant here because a menu never receives more space than it requested).

As you can see here every individual menu item uses only exactly the height which it needs.

Now, of course this example is only here to show the potential of what can be done with new menus and combo boxes… the above example is not exactly a “nice” menu to render with cells vertically stacked, however vertically stacking menus might still be attractive.

Or better yet, if your really hard-core you could take it to the next level and write a tabular GtkCellArea and use that to render the cells in your combo-boxes and menus (for instance, a thumbnail on the left and then some vertically stacked text/icon on the right might be interesting).

Although at Openismus we were only particularly interested in achieving proper alignments of cells in combo boxes and menus (for the normal case of multiple cells rendered horizontally), GtkCellArea brings alot of new stuff into the game of rendering cells.

Stay tuned for the actual GtkTreeView using GtkCellArea to render its cells 🙂

Update

Murray wanted a normal screen shot displaying how a basic combo-box drop down menu can be properly aligned so I went ahead and added a (simpler) test case to testcombo this time displaying aligned cells in the drop down menu.

Here we have a normal combo box displaying more than a single column and the cells are setup to “align” with cells in adjacent rows (note that the “align” child property of cells is meaningless for the first cell in a box, because it has no preceding cells it is always placed at the beginning of the allocation… however this might not be the case for right-to-left text direction, I still need to finalize the details of rtl layouting).

Good morning, afternoon, night Planet… I haven’t been regularly blogging and so sorry to start off with a weekend post but surely I will have some more posts following in the week.

This post is something of a follow up on this post, the height-for-width GtkTreeViews which never landed in GTK+ last summer are now on the verge of landing… after a lot of work internally refactoring GTK+ cell layouting algorithms, here’s a peek at what we’ve been doing at Openismus for GTK+.

What is GtkCellArea ?

You can read a detailed thread on gtk-devel-list where I originally proposed the new API, however I’ll include a brief overview here in this post.

Essentially GtkCellArea is an abstract container class for rendering GtkCellRenderers and is meant to abstract the layouting of cells in an area to be rendered onto a widget… one of the goals here is to completely centralize the cell layouting code in GTK+ so that widgets like GtkTreeView and GtkIconView don’t have to do the work of rendering individual cells manually. Another main goal is to provide an abstract coding interface to an area of cells; this opens up the road for cells to be rendered in different ways than your typical horizontally oriented list of cells that GtkTreeViewColumn currently does.

GtkCellArea “stuff” is composed of the following classes:

• GtkCellArea: an abstract class to render cells in an area
• GtkCellAreaContext: an abstract class to hold geometrical context of size requests and allocations over a series of GtkTreeModel rows.
• GtkCellAreaBox: the first concrete GtkCellArea which is an orientable ‘box’, when oriented horizontally it behaves like a GtkTreeViewColumn
• GtkCellAreaBoxContext: the GtkCellAreaContext created and used by GtkCellAreaBox.

Some things the GtkCellArea currently does:

• Implements packing “cell properties” for GtkCellRenderers. GtkCellArea subclasses can declare packing properties to define how a cell is to be layed out in the area (this is analogous to how GtkContainer subclasses define child placement with its packing properties).
• Provides GtkBuilder support to setup packing “cell properties” when <cell-packing> tags are specified in the children of a GtkCellLayout widget (also in the same way GtkContainer does it).
• Provides a focus navigation interface analogous to GtkWidgetClass->focus so that cell area can navigate focus in a semantically similar way that GtkWidget does (this of course simplifies the work for widgets that render cells when navigating focus internally from cell to cell and area to area).
• Provides cell-editing logic to bookkeep what is the currently edited cell and editing widget and a method to cancel the current edit, essentially a widget that renders cells only has to handle the GtkCellArea::add_editable/GtkCellArea::remove_editable signals.
• Provides a method to handle events, currently this is only used to activate/start editing cells inside an area where only the area itself can know where the cell is positioned, but potentially it can provide a way for GtkCellArea to also render widgets into a treeview or another cell layouting widget (provided that the widget sends all the important events to the cell area in focus or at the pointer position).

So, enough of the terse technical jargon, lets move on to some snapshots of the GtkCellArea in action.

GtkCellArea in action

The following screen shots were taken from the treeview-refactor branch which includes the initial GtkCellArea work. The initial test case for GtkCellArea is tests/testcellarea; it’s compiled with a ‘mock treeview’ called cellareascaffold.c, without being scrollable or doing any of the fancy treeview features such as rubberband selction or drag-n-drop, I’m happy to say it gets the treeview basics done in less than 1500 lines of code.

Here is the first shot of what you see when you fire up testcellarea:

An interesting thing to note here is that the second GtkCellRendererPixbuf cell  (the icons) is not “aligned” while the third cell with the wrapping text is aligned, alignments with the GtkCellAreaBox are optional and implemented as a packing property of the area.

As the CellAreaScaffold testing widget does not scroll, I’ve just packed it into a GtkFrame to show how vertical space can be relinquished when given a wider allocation:

The GtkCellArea of course also properly handles configuration of expanding cells (also via a child “cell packing” property):

And of course, the alignment of every cell can also be configured:

The GtkCellAreaBox is also GtkOrientable:

Moving on to another test case, the GtkCellArea also implements internal keyboard navigation and the painting of focus on cells:

There is also the concept of “focus siblings” implemented in GtkCellArea, this lets you place focus on a cell’s neighbor while a given cell is in focus:

This lets you decide which cells in the area should also have focus when a given cell has focus… siblings of focusable cells also cause the focusable cell to activate when they are “clicked”:

The GtkCellArea as I mentioned above also makes cell editing much easier, the CellAreaScaffold only has to recieve the ::add-editable and ::remove-editable signals, when ::add-editable is invoked, it comes with a brand new editable widget and a GdkRectangle dictating the area which the editable widget should be placed, the editable widget needs to be a GtkContainer of sorts and just add the editable widget in that size and position at the right time and then remove it when ::remove-editable is invoked.

That pretty much concludes chapter one in the GtkCellArea saga, Kristian Rietveld, our GtkTreeView master has been working with me in parallel over the past weeks to get GtkCellArea integrated as the rendering delegate of GtkTreeViewColumn.

But that’s not all ! while I’ve been waiting on GtkTreeView integration I’ve got a head start on refactoring GtkComboBox to render it’s menus with the new framework, so far I’ve come up with GtkTreeMenu which will reduce the huge mess of a codebase that is GtkComboBox considerably… and also open up many new avenues by making it possible to generate menus from GtkTreeModel. The GtkTreeMenu code is available in the combo-refactor branch.

GtkTreeMenu Basics

GtkTreeMenu starts off with all of the rich benefits of GtkCellArea, areas can be rendered with various cells, various alignments and expand configurations, in various orientations etc. Here are some shots from tests/testtreemenu from the afore mentioned combo-refactor branch:

Now also we can align all the cells:

In the above screen shot we can observe the usefulness of GtkCellAreaContext, note here that every GtkTreeMenu (each submenu is itself a GtkTreeMenu) share the same GtkCellArea, however they each have a private GtkCellAreaContext which is used to request / align / allocate the size to use when rendering the area. In this way leafs of each tree get the same cell alignments however the overall width of each submenu can be different (cells in submenus are aligned with cells in the same submenu but not aligned with cells in parent menus).

Another detail of GtkTreeMenu is that it uses a GtkTreeMenuHeaderFunc to decide whether it should include a menu header for the parent item which had a submenu. This is important for combo-boxes since combo boxes need to be able to actually select every row in the GtkTreeModel including rows which have children:

Pie in the Sky

Whether or not GtkTreeMenu should be an exposed class or only an internal detail of implementing GtkComboBox is a question that we’ve been tossing around on irc these past days. Interestingly, with some more work in this area GtkMenuBar and GtkToolBar could also be rendered using cellviews and GtkCellArea… in other words the main application toolbar or menubar could be simply built off of a GtkTreeModel. Even fancier still, would be to have GtkApplication actually implement GtkTreeModel for its menu and toolbar actions and just build the application menus automagically, possibly easing the integration of menubars on OSX and making things make alot more sense in general. Ofcourse this kind of approach has a lot of details that need consideration, menu accelerator key and the like are one of them… but it does sound like a tempting approach to just get rid of most of the hand-built GtkMenuItem API (and also finally drop GtkUIManager in favor of using GtkTreeMenus…).

Those are just some ideas… that might inspire one of you hackers… to come and make GTK+ 3.0 more rocking than ever 🙂

Stay tuned for more news on GtkTreeView refactoring !

These last weeks I’ve been working on finishing the remaining bits of the height-for-width layout system for GTK+.

The GtkExtendedLayout interface, which has recently been renamed to GtkSizeRequest has been merged into GTK+ recently with only some basic features leveraging the new code (the new GtkSizeRequest interface allows widgets to trade height for width when negotiating their geometry, read this informative post for more details on how this works).

I’m going to be putting a branch together to be reviewed but here’s a sneak preview of what’s been added in height-for-width land.

Wrapping expander labels:

When the expander is allocated something smaller:

At it’s smallest size:

Ok ok I know expanders are not that exciting… I’m only posting them cause the screenshots have pretty colours in them…

Naturally sizing Tree Views

Ok this is the juice, as you might guess working anything new into the treeview code is … some kind of nightmare… so first the easy part… here are some ellipsizing cell renderers packed into some columns in a view to show how it naturally sizes:

And when you shrink it:

Wrapping Cell Renderers in Tree Views

Ok heres the wild stuff, first of all I have to say I’m not very proud of all the cute kittens I had to slay to get this done… that is to say that there is an interesting new problem for scrolled windows that parent height for width widgets that may result in deadly feedback loops that lockup your desktop… thankfully I found a trick to avoid it. It’s not that pretty and in the long term the hack should be replaced… with… well with something generally more kind to your kittens.

All that said… it does work and calculate row-height for width asynchronously in the background and only when columns are set to resize etc etc… hopefully this wont be much of a performance hit for views that handle large datasets.

The above shows the treeview at its full width; it’s packed in a scrolled window with automatic scrollbars.

When you shrink the view the row heights will be recalculated and redisplayed, the horizontal scrollbar of the scrolled window will only appear if the child view is allocated less than its minimum possible width.

This particular view can be resized very slim, just because the minimum width-chars of the renderers are not set and so they are all permitted to get pretty small:

While I’m happy to have got as far as wrapping text in treeview’s; that was only the hardest challenge of the GtkCellRenderer brand – after this there is still more to be done for GtkIconView, GtkCellView and consequently, GtkComboBox.

And of course, all of this fancy cell renderer stuff is going to have to pass review and all… but we’re getting there !

And I’m proud to say that all these recent developments have been brought to you by Openismus GmbH.

Enjoy !

Over the past weeks I’ve been concentrating my full energies on an Openismus funded expedition to finalize the extended layout patches that teach height-for-width geometry management to GTK+.

Its time to show off a little what came out of this effort:

No ! not the crazy allocation assertions from hell ! I’m just kidding; I’m not sure if those assertions come from running the Gimp against git master or from running against the native-layout branch. The point of this shot is only to say the stuff is pretty damn stable. I’ve been creating the demos (in this post and my last blog post) using Glade running directly against a modified height-for-width GTK+ core. The above screenshot was taken with the Gimp running against the modified GTK+ and it displayed and behaved fine during the exercise.

So that was my first priority: turn the work into something that we can all use right now, there are some really minor API breaks (also discussed in the announcement) but from what I’ve seen so far you’re favorite application will run just fine against the new GTK+ code (that includes sticky places where the application tries to hack its own height-for-width labels by way of handling “size-request” signals and such).

One of the really difficult parts of getting this working was to make container widgets report sensible width-for-height/height-for-width collectively for their children:

The trick is the horizontal box has to compute a collective minimum and natural height for its overall allocated width:

Trickier still, was to figure out how a height-for-width widget and a width-for-height widget could live together  in the same hierarchy and at least always require enough space in both dimensions (so that we can set reasonable window constraints based on the interface’s minimum size and labels don’t wrap ever out of view unexpectedly).

After a lot of thought and valuable insights shared on irc (Owen, Matthias…), a good nights sleep and then another day hacking we were able to dish out a GTK+ that will also do width-for-height:

And the two possible extremities of the window pane:

And:

All of this is available in the ‘native-layout’. A trimmed down branch has been created for review of the base feature set called ‘native-layout-incubator’ where you can find the above demo ‘extendedlayoutexample’.

Thanks Murray and Openismus for the great experience, and for the great new features for GTK+ !

These weeks, on the generous behalf of Openismus; I’ve been spending my full attentions on teaching GTK+ some new tricks where resizing the interface is involved.

It was a rocky ride of detective work at first; picking up the bit’s and pieces of Mathias Hasselmann’s original work, various other patches from the old branch and reading dozens of email threads and bug reports; all of which make up a web of information that spans over the last 5 years.

This was followed by a session of regression testing; I wanted to have a good grasp of what was working and what was broken in the branch (I also hoped I could kill all the regressions before introducing any features). That went quite well as I have a good grasp on what’s still broken and what features are still missing.

After all that hacking it was about time I owed you all a blog so lets take a look at what the features are and where we stand with them.

What is the Extended/Natural Layout ?

The Extended Layout has been defined as a few things in the past which covered different feature sets. For the purpose of this writeup we intend to achieve the 2 main goals which are:

• Smartly distributing space to child widgets to display the maximum content of children before adding any extra space.
• Allowing height-for-width/width-for-height contextual resizing

Some key points about what these features introduce are:

• In addition to the concept of a widget having a minimum size; a widget can also use up extra space by declaring a “natural size”, this aspect allows for the first feature.
• Sizes are only ever computed in one dimension at a time, either for the default widths/heights or in context of the size in the opposing dimension. This means a minimum “size” no longer exists as we know it; although it can be emulated by getting the minimum width for the natural height of a widget. This change is also what allows us to negotiate size properly with wrapping labels.

So, people may remember Havoc Pennington’s blog post on text that resizes properly (it was years ago), anyhow; here are some similar visuals on how GTK+ widgets are resizing in the native-layout branch:

Here is a horizontal box with some basic display widgets inside; at the natural size:

And here at a smaller size, note that the larger button and label will ellipsize before the small combo box:

But all the children do ellipsize:

When the layout is larger; the button in the center is sized to its natural size before allocating extra size to the children which asked to “expand”:

Well that’s an idea of what the natural sizes bring to the GTK+ interface, there are of course other widgets that are not yet working with the new layout; I gave cell renderers some attention for combo boxes but they still need work to be usable in treeviews (that’s one of the current regressions actually…).

Height-for-Width

The height for width feature basically allows for the above feature to work the same for container widgets who are interested in allocating decent sizes for children, but allow for more flexible display widgets found deep in the roots of GTK+ widget hierarchies.

Here is a quick example of what wrapping labels can do with height-for-width support, here is a vertical box with some height-for-width aware widgets packed in; along with a static Label widget to fill the extra space:

Here is the same interface slightly wider:

Note how the wrapping labels request less height for every line they unwrap:

Currently I’m also experiencing some difficulty getting height-for-width information to cascade correctly through the ancestry of boxes in GTK+, I tried my best to outline the details in a post I wrote to gtk-devel-list yesterday, of course all feedback welcome there.

For those who will checkout the branch; I will be adding some more test cases next week (in a few days), currently sizegroups are broken after a mega API change; although they we’re broken in some ways to begin with and now I have a good idea of how to fix them; any feedback on the new GtkExtendedLayout/GtkExtendedCell apis would be great if you have time to stop by gtk-devel-list.

Well so far it’s been an honor and pleasure to do this work for Openismus, on a project I already like to participate in (GTK+). The project is an ambitious one surely, lets go do it justice 😉

Update:

Murray suggested I should post some comparison shots; Good idea.

All the previously shown screen shots were taken using the new GTK+ native-layout features.

Here are some comparisons of how the interface reacts with and without the added features. In this first example you can see that with current GTK+; Combo Boxes request widths for ellipsizing Cell Renderers which it shouldn’t. Also you can see that Buttons/Labels will not know how to request more than: “…”:

Here we can see that without any explicit width requests, GTK+ with Extended Layout features can spread the ellipsizing Labels properly:

when stretched out, the exact same interface will comparatively look like this:

In the case of normal GTK+ the Button in the center never requests a “Natural” size. As it is also not set to expand inside the Horizontal Box; the button stays very small in the center.

Here we can see that even though we never told the button to expand, Extended Layout will help it at least request a “Natural” size:

In the height-for-width case, this is what the stretched UI would look like without the Extended Layout features:

In this final case its clear that GTK+ doesn’t know how to rewrap the label on its own, some applications these days implement hacks to get this to work by riding the “size-request” and “size-allocate” signals.