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Re: gEDA-user: Comments after successfully running gnetman . . . .

El dom, 23-11-2003 a las 03:30, Stuart Brorson escribió:
[snip]
> *  A separate multi-line text entry pop-up could have a fixed-size
> text input area and scroll bars.  Right now, the text entry area
> expands to fit the text as you type it in.  This just "feels" funny.

This is a widget's feature. If the text entry area is too small, then
the widget automatically expands itself and display scroll bars.

> I continue to look at GTK+ to try to figure out how it works so that I
> can make some changes in gschem like you have done.  But GTK is quite
> large . . . .

If you want to do it, you can take a look at the multiline text entry
dialog, which I think it's more or less what you want.

You need to add a new button to the attribute editor and connect its
callback to a function that creates and displays the text entry window.
If you take a look at x_dialog.nw (multiline text entry window), the
function text_entry_dialog creates the new window and connect the
callback of the OK and Cancel buttons to text_input_dialog_apply and
text_input_dialog_close. The first one changes the attribute.

[snip]
> > but I
> > think gschem needs a really good attribute editor...
> 
> So then my question is:  what are the requirements of the "really good
> attribute editor"?  The one we have right now is not bad, and would be
> better if there was a secondary text-entry window for multi-line
> attributes.  What else would one want?


> Here is one thought:  Replace "close" with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons,
> which are more intuitive because they are more common. 
> 

There are buttons in GTK including by default the text and the icon
related (see gtk_button_new_from_stock function). They look very nice,
and I think a good improvement to gschem will be using such buttons.
There are a quite large list, so near all commonly used buttons are
there (OK, Cancel, apply, and so on).


> Beyond that, the attribute dialog works well for me.  But I'm sure
> more clever people than I may have some better ideas.

I'm not saying it doesn't work well. It's good but I think it could be
improved. I was using Orcad before, and I liked the way of
watching/changing attributes, but sure there are other good solutions
out there.

Some of my wishlist:

  - Be able to watch/change attributes of more than one part. There are
times when I just want to check an attribute of a set of parts (and
change it if it's wrong). I can now change the attribute of a given set
of parts, but I can't check, watch or compare them in a single window.
I'm thinking in a matrix, when each row is a given part, and each column
an attribute. Be able to select some of them using Control and/or Shift
keys could be a good thing.

  - The above point can be extended to nets and other types of objects,
but I don't want to mix parts with nets, for example, so maybe Orcad
solution is good: they use a notebook where each tab is only for one
type of object (one for parts, another for nets,...). I wouldn't want to
attach a netname attribute to a part, so some sanity checking should be
done here.

  - You may want to change the attribute to something special, like a
pathname, a directory, or a multiline text for example. The window could
have some buttons for special values like these. Clicking on them, a new
window raises where you can enter it in a user friendly way (a file
selector, a multiline text entry widget...).

I know someone suggested some time ago to use GtkSheet widget for
attributes. It wasn't done, maybe because it will require another
library dependency.
Gtk has now a very interesting widget: a treeview with editable fields.
It allows to display a list, maybe organized in a tree, edit the values
on the fly (single line text, I think), and display even checkboxes as
values. 
You can take a look at it if you run the program "gtk-demo". In Debian
it's in a package called "gtk2.0-examples". If you run it, double click
on the three examples of the treeview widget.

I think this widget could be a good candidate for an attribute
display/edit window. I havent' played with it yet, so I don't know all
the possibilities of this widget, or if we can do all what we want with
it (this should be checked before).

Just some thoughts...

Carlos


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