Re: [XBoard-devel] gtk update

[h.g. muller]

> I'm working on the game list at the moment. John Cheetham is also
> joining in (GNU paperwork is being filed, so he should be able to commit
> to git soon) and starting on ErrorPopDown and ErrorPopUP and perhaps
> some other smaller items.

Ah yes,  forgot about those.


> So Move History sounds good, if you want to give it a try

OK, I pushed a new WinBoard-style Move History to hgm.nubati.net.
I used the generic popup for it, but it still contains more Xaw front-end code
than I would like. This because it needs a unique feature to control the 
vscroll,
and it needs highlighting of part of the text in it. The Engine-Output has
something similar, but not quite the same for its calbacks/translations,
so it did not seem worthwile to merge them to something more generic.

I used right-click where WinBoard used double-click (I don't know if Xaw
knows the latter as a separate event you can add a translation for), for
indicating a move you want to go to. If GTK allows this, I guess we should
change back to the double-click.

Btw, this Xaw version suffers from the problem we already ran into when trying
to port the WinBoard ICS Interaction window, namely that it does not seem
possible to mix characters with different font attributes in one Xaw text 
widget.
This makes it more difficult to recognize the moves from the text, especially
when "extra info in move history" is on (so that the score/depth info is 
printed
there as well). In WinBoard the move numbers are boldface,  and the depth/score
info gray, while the current move is made bold and blue. As a poor-man's 
solution
to the latter, I select the last move as a means to display it in reverse 
video.
I hope that a GTK port of this an restore the original WinBoard functionality.

While working on it I ran into an old bug in positioning the Move List window
(a stray 'else'), which I also fixed.


> For some of the windows we might be able to use some nicer features of
> GTK, for example I could think of a tabbed interface for the
> preferences? So whoever finds something implemented in some other GTK
> program that they think would be nice to have in xboard, feel free to
> post it here...

I am not particularly crazy about tabbed interfaces; any advantage w.r.t.
having separate dialogs eludes me. It just seems a method to drive up
the number of mouse clicks to do the same thing... Basic rule is that
changes are bad. So we should not make any just because we can.
Only if we need them, and they serve a purpose.

Of course the +/- buttons behind numeric fields are supposed to be
spin controls, which probably are in the GTK repertoir. Similarly,
the color-picker I kind of improvised in the View->Board menu dialog
will probably have a standard solution in GTK too.

I guess GTK will also support a font picker, which would allow us to
make a font dialog like WinBoard has (in the View menu, I guess).

> sounds good... but perhaps it's in some cases easier to just write a new
> glade file than creating new generic popups.

That could be true, but unless the difference is very large, I would prefer
to use he generic dialog. Writing new glade files doesn't help towards
porting to platforms where GTK would not available. Eliminating front-end
code will.


> Most changes from the old GTK-branch can be transferred, but the old
> version wasn't complete (e.g. no variation support) and many things have
> changed, so it is probably easier to recode things and use the old
> xboard.c and especially the glade file as a template.

The variation support did not interact with the front-end that much, did it?
IIRC the only requirements where to be able to read the state of the Shift key,
and a click-to-character-position callback in the Comment window.
Well, the Comment window does not exist anymore (as separate code),
and I guess this is quite typical for most of the changes: things have
disappeared. The corresponding patches then cannot be applied, but
we could simply abandon those, and only keep those that did apply.

> Apart from the list you mentioned there is also the help menu that could
> be updated and I think lots of other smaller items.

There are no dialogs in the Help menu other than the About Box, and you
seem to have already done that. (Btw, I saw you also had a list of contributors
for the translations there; I think we should add the names of the translators
for the WinBoard files we started from there.)