ListPatron and GtkGrid

Friday, January 28th, 2005

So far I’ve been using GTK’s GtkTreeView in ListPatron. While this works fairly well, editing and manipulating columns is quite a hassle. For instance, it is practically impossible to select a column, let alone more than one column.

Someone on #gtk+ (FreeNode IRC network) pointed me to GtkGrid. I’ve done some research on grids for GTK 2.+ versions, but couldn’t really find anything useful. Must have overlooked GtkGrid. After some searching in the Gnome mailinglists, I stumbled upon this link

When GtkGrid was first suggested to me, I thought to myself “This is gonna require a major rewrite of ListPatron”, which I didn’t like at all. But when I found GtkGrid’s homepage, I was much delighted by the following comment on the site:

Not only that I’m reusing existing GTK+ code but I’m also trying to make the API for GtkGrid as close as possible to the GtkTreeView API. Changing your code from one to the other is just a matter of changing 2 lines.

Guess I’ll be rewriting ListPatron to use GtkGrid instead.

Only thing that’s bothering me is this:

First of all, for version 0.2.2 you will need to apply the patch grid-0.2.2.patch to GTK+ if you want to use the Combo renderer

ListPatron isn’t using Combo boxes for cellrenderers yet, but I was planning on using them. Now, I don’t want to force people to recompile GTK just so they can use ListPatron with Combo boxes in the sheets. I still have to find out if it’s just for version 0.2.2 that this patch is required, but if it’s also required for future versions, I’m not sure I’ll be happy with that.

Update:
Some problems:

• Development seems to have stopped.
• It’s missing some features I need

When I find the time (hahaha, I always say that) I’ll e-mail the author and ask him what’s the status on the project.