[XaraXtreme-dev] Re: Sliders, and customizing GTK controls

[Mart Raudsepp <leio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 21:08 +0100, Alex Bligh wrote:
> Thanks to Mart Raudsepp, I have put in some code in wxXtra which
> customizes how wxWidgets uses sliders. Specifically it customizes
> them not have suge humungously large thumbs on some themes.
> Mart even had it working with extremely thin thumbs, though
> a couple of themes (notably Ubuntu Human, sadly) don't work that
> well with thumbs any smaller than the current ones.

Ubuntu Human in dapper should be fixed now by the author. He received
some beating from my part ;)
Clearlooks in gtk-engines-2.7.x (the version using cairo, will be
default in GNOME-2.16, and many distros already use it by default in
2.14) should cope with various slider thumb sizes now in HEAD too.

> The great thing about this technique is we /should/ be able to
> use it to override theme style on a number of different controls.
> We may even be able to detect buggy themes and fix them.

It turns out it is kind of possible to detect what theme is currently
used with this:

gchar *theme_name;
g_object_get (gtk_settings_get_default(),
              "gtk-theme-name", &theme_name, NULL);
printf ("Theme name: %s\n", theme_name);
g_free (theme_name);

This should return a string that describes the theme used. This is often
the name of the directory in /usr/share/themes, e.g "Clearlooks".

If there's a GtkWidget available (such as GetHandle on the slider), then
gtk_settings_get_for_screen(gtk_widget_get_screen(slider->GetHandle()))
might be better, instead of gtk_settings_get_default()

Ideally themes would get fixed to cope with special use-cases like
these.
I can prod some people to get to that when cases are identified, or file
my own patches when necessary.

> I have hopes we may be able to use Mart's technique to fix double
> decker text controls (finally).

-- 
With regards,
Mart Raudsepp

Project manager of wxMUD      - http://wxmud.sourceforge.net/
Developer of wxWidgets        - http://www.wxwidgets.org/
GTK+ port maintainer of OMGUI - http://www.omgui.org/