[PD] GUI toolkits and custom GUIs WAS: Integra Live 1.5 released

[Jonathan Wilkes]

----- Original Message -----

> From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
> To: pd-list at iem.at
> Cc: 
> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 4:31 PM
> Subject: [PD] GUI toolkits and custom GUIs WAS: Integra Live 1.5 released
> 
> On 01/18/2013 04:14 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>>  ________________________________
>>>  From: Leandro da Mota Damasceno <lemota at gmail.com>
>>>  To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com> 
>>>  Cc: Pierre-Olivier Boulant <po.boulant at free.fr>; pd-list 
> <pd-list at iem.at> 
>>>  Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 2:40 PM
>>>  Subject: Re: [PD] [announce] Integra Live 1.5 released
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  So if we wanted to improve the GUI we would have to drop tcl/tk all 
> together or make it messy and heavy?
>> 
>> 
>>  Depends on which features of the interface you want to improve.  Ivica 
> improved the logic
>>  that controls when scrollbars appear in a patch in Pd-l2ork, as well as 
> more efficient
>>  movement and manipulation of iemguis.  However, stuff like gradients in a 
> patch, zooming
>>  on a canvas, better handling of fonts, and many other issues require 
> "messes" of code.
>> 
>>  -Jonathan
> 
> It also depends on what you mean by "improve".  I personally want 
> Pd's GUI to
> look and act as native as possible on any given platform, and it turns out
> that Tk is one of the better GUI toolkits for doing that.  Tk is quite slow
> for raw drawing, so that's a problem.

Tk doesn't do that at all in GNU/Linux, as far as I can tell.  That's why that
gui plugin is called gtk-look, because it looks somewhat like a gtk window but
does not act like it.  For example: click the File menu, then click it again to
close it (which is how gtk menus work).  It won't close.  In fact tk menus work
exactly this way on any distro that uses x11 as its window system, regardless
of the look-and-feel of the distro.  Controlling/standardizing look-and-feel is
what every desktop environment and window manager is there to do in the first
place, even/especially the behemoths like kde and gnome.  Setting aside some
Gnome 3 ui nonsense, most modern gui toolkits seem to be aware of basic
common features among them and have "sane" defaults that essentially
standardize the ux for GNU/Linux users.  Keeping with this example-- clicking
through a menu in Minitube (built with Qt) is exactly the same experience as
clicking through a menu in Firefox (probably gtk).  Clicking through a tk menu
is not the same as these.

Nor is bringing up a file selection menu.  The length of the full path
determines the width of the file selection menu ("Open" menu), and the icon to
climb up one directory is to the RIGHT of this string.  Thus if you start inside a
directory that has a long path and you want to climb out, say, two levels, each
time you click the icon the window gets smaller and the icon moves out from under
your mouse, making it unnecessarily burdensome to quickly climb out to the root
directory.  The "open" dialogue for Qt and Gtk look exactly the same in Gnome 
because it is actually the _native_ dialogue for the DE/WM/whatever.

If the ttk theming engine can be used to change this behavior that'd be great, but
I couldn't find any documentation that even hints that it does.  In fact on OSX this
ttk theming engine actually guesses wrong at the bgcolor for a dialog window
(which took me awhile to figure out with the search plugin).

Anyway I guess tk was developed at a time when you could actually claim "x" as
a "platform", but unless you're comfortable using the phrase "information
superhighway" and putting rainbow dividers on your webpage then "emulating
motif" shouldn't really count as native look-and-feel.

-Jonathan