really excited
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jsunth...@gmail.com
Jan 13, 2018, 8:47:28 AM1/13/18
to Gnocl
Really excited to see the recent activity. The "Gtk 3" word is mentioned from time to time in your project. This has been abandoned, correct? The current direction and vision for Gnocl is that it's for the stable and relatively slim 2.x series Gtk?
William Giddings
Jan 13, 2018, 10:54:20 AM1/13/18
to gn...@googlegroups.com
Hi,
Thanks for the questions and, of course, for your continued interest in the Gnocl project.Yes, some time ago I began putting the development files in place for a Gnocl based on Gtk3+ and it works. However, recent talk in the Gtk/Gnome developer pages refers to the parallel development of Gtk4 alongside the Gtk3.8+ releases. Making the complete move over to Gtk3+ would take so long that Gtk4+ would be on the scene and so I'd have to handle a whole pile of new api calls and deprecations.
So, cleaning up on Gtk2 and then making the move to 4 makes more sense to me.
In addition, there's a lot of work involved in bringing the Documentation up todate.Not all of it is good, however. Too much backwards incompatibility.
On 13 January 2018 at 13:47, <jsunth...@gmail.com> wrote:
Really excited to see the recent activity. The "Gtk 3" word is mentioned from time to time in your project. This has been abandoned, correct? The current direction and vision for Gnocl is that it's for the stable and relatively slim 2.x series Gtk?
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jsunth...@gmail.com
Jan 15, 2018, 3:10:34 AM1/15/18
to Gnocl
Hi,
So I was wondering if I might get your thoughts, though I don't mean at all to demand them. If at any point you are disinterested, please stop reading and don't bother to reply, I won't be offended at all :)
I am working on a little linux distribution called Rexbang, built on/with the new Slax, which is now based on Debian, and is the "vanity distro" of the guy that makes the Linux Live Kit. It's what he would do with the Linux Live Kit if it existed, which it does, because he wrote it. And this guy is no slouch at X11- he uses his own X11/imlib2 stuff in Slax. It only includes a few user apps in the base install- wicd manager, leafpad, his own patched version of PCmanFM that doesn't complain about running as root- lol. All of them Gtk+ 2 apps, and Chromium.
Some guy once found a willing linux window manager developer to put Tk straight into the WM. Like Jwm but Tk. He had a Tk Canvas as the root window, so the "wallpaper" was anything a Tk Canvas could do! It was built for the perfect Tk based distro. Their ultimate reward for this effort was broken hyperlinks on the wiki.
There was a guy just the other day, (yesterday? the day before?) on comp.lang.tcl or whatever it's called that was asking about a Tk-based file manager. There were references to the wiki, and a little questioning about why someone could possibly want such a monstrosity. This guy reported that all but one of the wiki links were dead, but he found one he could sorta work with he guessed.
Last anecdote: last year while doing some X11 work I did a drive-by of the Tk repo. Some dude was working hard to give Tk a really top notch text widget, the kind of text widget that does have people on irc discourage it's use for anything "serious." He has apparently disappeared, and on irc, they say that to peer into the Tk text widget is to stare into Nietzsche's Void. Gtk+ 2 text widget is used in some pretty great software, such as Geany, and in digging around for text widget alternatives, it turns out scintilla (not just Scite, I guess) has a dependency on Gtk+ 2.
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So I'm sort of at an impasse. I would love to use Tk, and bring some of the Rexbang pizzazz to ttk, unifying it with an openbox theme, building a clone of PCManFM or Thunar (just for example) in Tk, one where it's really trivially easy to change the right-click options, let's say, or one doesn't require patching C code to make trivial changes. Since so many Tclers are also system programmers, it's sometimes lost even on Tclers why custom patching C code is any different to editing a tcl file, but it really really is easier to do the latter. And yes, this is all easy and simple, but it's going to require "dark knowledge" that no one really cares about, despite full tcl interpreters being distributed with Ruby and Python, for instance. I would come out on the other side as a domain expert in a nearly perfectly and universally irrelevant domain.
On the other hand, even in a Tk wonderland of riches, probably the very first time someone installs their own preferred desktop software, they are going to be dragging in Gtk. Puppy and Slax both come with Gtk+ 2. Raspbian comes with Gtk+ 2. The hypothetical user might bring Qt, but probably Gtk. 1 in a milllion will pull something like Athena with Vim.
So while I don't want to strictly avoid Tk (I'm totally stealing that tk canvas as root window idea) I might well be better off using gnocl. I would get a rich and continuing history of Gtk themeing, top notch yet stable widgets, all the ease and flexibility of Tcl, play nicely with others, you even demonstrate that x-platform Gnocl (Tcl/Gtk+2) tclkits are within the realm of possibility. It's not "light" to the degree Tk is light, but it's light like a Pi is light. That all together is a very tempting proposition. It would certainly accelerate my efforts.
What do you think?
On Saturday, January 13, 2018 at 10:54:20 AM UTC-5, WJG wrote:
If you are interested in reading about the leap to Gtk4, heres some backround, info.Hi,Thanks for the questions and, of course, for your continued interest in the Gnocl project.
Yes, some time ago I began putting the development files in place for a Gnocl based on Gtk3+ and it works. However, recent talk in the Gtk/Gnome developer pages refers to the parallel development of Gtk4 alongside the Gtk3.8+ releases. Making the complete move over to Gtk3+ would take so long that Gtk4+ would be on the scene and so I'd have to handle a whole pile of new api calls and deprecations.So, cleaning up on Gtk2 and then making the move to 4 makes more sense to me.In addition, there's a lot of work involved in bringing the Documentation up todate.
Not all of it is good, however. Too much backwards incompatibility.
On 13 January 2018 at 13:47, <jsunth...@gmail.com> wrote:
Really excited to see the recent activity. The "Gtk 3" word is mentioned from time to time in your project. This has been abandoned, correct? The current direction and vision for Gnocl is that it's for the stable and relatively slim 2.x series Gtk?
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