#gtk3 — Public Fediverse posts

I have been banging my head against #Gtk3 for the past 3 weeks and all progress has pretty much come to a stand-still. No matter how simple and straight-forward my GUI is, Gtk makes it simply impossible to get the layout correct. I am now convinced that programming my own layout algorithm from scratch and using the GtkLayout container (which lets you place widgets at arbitrary X,Y coordinates) is the only way to proceed at this point. It is soooo frustrating.

The #Gtk documentation is good, but not at all good enough. The people on the Gnome Discourse have been very kind and helpful, and I truly appreciate the engagement I have had there, but ultimately I am still not able to solve my problems.

I have decided I need find some way to keep making progress without postponing the release of the work I have done so far for an indeterminate length of time. So rather than work out all the bugs in this version before merging it to the main Git branch, what I will do instead is have the main program launch a debugger window. The debugger window will have all layout calculated in advance, and all widgets will be declared once and only once throughout the lifetime of the application to avoid the reference counting issues. Obviously the debugger GUI will be very rigid, but you will at least be able to edit files and run commands in a REPL within this debugger.

Then maybe I can merge the code I have written to the main Git branch, and people will at least be able to use it through the debugger. Maybe also I could use this debugger to help with writing my layout algorithm. Also, I need to get back to the Emacs Lisp interpreter, I haven’t worked on it in almost two months now.

#tech #software #Lisp #Emacs #EmacsLisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #R7RS

I have been banging my head against #Gtk3 for the past 3 weeks and all progress has pretty much come to a stand-still. No matter how simple and straight-forward my GUI is, Gtk makes it simply impossible to get the layout correct. I am now convinced that programming my own layout algorithm from scratch and using the GtkLayout container (which lets you place widgets at arbitrary X,Y coordinates) is the only way to proceed at this point. It is soooo frustrating.

The #Gtk documentation is good, but not at all good enough. The people on the Gnome Discourse have been very kind and helpful, and I truly appreciate the engagement I have had there, but ultimately I am still not able to solve my problems.

I have decided I need find some way to keep making progress without postponing the release of the work I have done so far for an indeterminate length of time. So rather than work out all the bugs in this version before merging it to the main Git branch, what I will do instead is have the main program launch a debugger window. The debugger window will have all layout calculated in advance, and all widgets will be declared once and only once throughout the lifetime of the application to avoid the reference counting issues. Obviously the debugger GUI will be very rigid, but you will at least be able to edit files and run commands in a REPL within this debugger.

Then maybe I can merge the code I have written to the main Git branch, and people will at least be able to use it through the debugger. Maybe also I could use this debugger to help with writing my layout algorithm. Also, I need to get back to the Emacs Lisp interpreter, I haven’t worked on it in almost two months now.

#tech #software #Lisp #Emacs #EmacsLisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #R7RS

I have been banging my head against #Gtk3 for the past 3 weeks and all progress has pretty much come to a stand-still. No matter how simple and straight-forward my GUI is, Gtk makes it simply impossible to get the layout correct. I am now convinced that programming my own layout algorithm from scratch and using the GtkLayout container (which lets you place widgets at arbitrary X,Y coordinates) is the only way to proceed at this point. It is soooo frustrating.

The #Gtk documentation is good, but not at all good enough. The people on the Gnome Discourse have been very kind and helpful, and I truly appreciate the engagement I have had there, but ultimately I am still not able to solve my problems.

I have decided I need find some way to keep making progress without postponing the release of the work I have done so far for an indeterminate length of time. So rather than work out all the bugs in this version before merging it to the main Git branch, what I will do instead is have the main program launch a debugger window. The debugger window will have all layout calculated in advance, and all widgets will be declared once and only once throughout the lifetime of the application to avoid the reference counting issues. Obviously the debugger GUI will be very rigid, but you will at least be able to edit files and run commands in a REPL within this debugger.

Then maybe I can merge the code I have written to the main Git branch, and people will at least be able to use it through the debugger. Maybe also I could use this debugger to help with writing my layout algorithm. Also, I need to get back to the Emacs Lisp interpreter, I haven’t worked on it in almost two months now.

#tech #software #Lisp #Emacs #EmacsLisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #R7RS

I have been banging my head against #Gtk3 for the past 3 weeks and all progress has pretty much come to a stand-still. No matter how simple and straight-forward my GUI is, Gtk makes it simply impossible to get the layout correct. I am now convinced that programming my own layout algorithm from scratch and using the GtkLayout container (which lets you place widgets at arbitrary X,Y coordinates) is the only way to proceed at this point. It is soooo frustrating.

The #Gtk documentation is good, but not at all good enough. The people on the Gnome Discourse have been very kind and helpful, and I truly appreciate the engagement I have had there, but ultimately I am still not able to solve my problems.

I have decided I need find some way to keep making progress without postponing the release of the work I have done so far for an indeterminate length of time. So rather than work out all the bugs in this version before merging it to the main Git branch, what I will do instead is have the main program launch a debugger window. The debugger window will have all layout calculated in advance, and all widgets will be declared once and only once throughout the lifetime of the application to avoid the reference counting issues. Obviously the debugger GUI will be very rigid, but you will at least be able to edit files and run commands in a REPL within this debugger.

Then maybe I can merge the code I have written to the main Git branch, and people will at least be able to use it through the debugger. Maybe also I could use this debugger to help with writing my layout algorithm. Also, I need to get back to the Emacs Lisp interpreter, I haven’t worked on it in almost two months now.

#tech #software #Lisp #Emacs #EmacsLisp #Scheme #SchemeLang #R7RS

https://thoughts.greyh.at/posts/celestial-gtk-theme/

@zquestz published an article on Gtk theming which I found fascinating. It is an overview of the kind of things you have to consider when trying to create your own theme for #Linux . He fusses over the little details that are very important when doing UI/UX design properly. He also made sure the themes worked properly on various Gtk desktop environments, including Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce (three of the best DEs, in my humble opinion).

He also mentions the qt6gtk2 plugin for Qt which I did not know about. It translates Gtk themes to Qt themes so all of your applications, whether they use Gtk or Qt, have the correct theme. This is extremely useful since the impedance mismatch between Qt and Gtk is the biggest source of UI/UX inconsistencies in Linux apps.

#tech #software #Linux #UI #UX #theming #LinuxThemes #CinnamonDE #Xfce #MateDE #LinuxMint #Xubuntu #UbuntuMATE #ArchLinux #Gtk #Gtk2 #Gtk3 #Qt5 #Qt6 #UnixPorn #ricing

Wrote a blogpost about simple (I mean with a shell and a text editor) #X11 configuration.

Covered topics:
1) #Trackball configuration for left hand. Also remapping of some buttons to have scrolling and middle button (not exists out of the box).
2) Theming: #GTK2 #GTK3 #QT , installing cursor(s), fonts and icons.
3) #Xrandr for multimonitor configuration
4) #Xserver settings for #HighDPI
5) #XDG utils and #Emacs as a system file manager
6) #XDM login window

https://eugene-andrienko.com/en/it/2025/07/24/x11-configuration-simple.html

#FreeBSD