Re: Milestone 1 submission...

Andy Piper <andy(a)xemacs.ORG&gt; writes: I really don't like the thought of writing a complex gui as a bunch of glyph instantiators either. For things that will be going in the gutter this is doable, but writing something like the `customize' interface from sawmill would be ... not fun. I'm getting ready to start writing the detailed implementation plan, and think that something like: (setq gui (make-gui '(property-sheet ((name . "main sheet") (background-color . "white") (foreground-color . "black")) (window ((name . "Tree Control Tab")) (tree-control ((name . "first tree control") (attribute-1 . "value-1") (attribute-2 . "value-2"))))))) Will be the way to go. Basically a GUI would be a list similar to what the Emacs/W3 HTML parser outputs (which would be similar to the theoretical XML parser output for loading Glade output files). Basically each element is (NAME ATTR-ASSOC CONTENT). The NAME can be used to pull the widget out of the UI object later (to set/get properties of it - both Gtk and Qt provide really easy ways to set properties based on text strings). The ATTR-ASSOC is just an assoc list of attribute-value pairs. If you wanted to change something about the widgets after creating the initial UI, you could do: (setq widget (gui-get-widget gui "main sheet")) ; perhaps 'main-sheet? (put widget 'background-color "hotpink") ; just to sear the eyeballs The main PITA here would be getting names for the widgets everyone can agree upon. :) Andy has already done a lot of that though. I don't think there are any major widgets implemented by Gtk not implemented by Qt and vice versa. Motif and Athena are completely different stories though. Callbacks would be Gtk/Qt-ish and have 'signals' that are emitted. You would set the handlers for the signals either thru special attribute names (signal-map or something like that) or 'widget-add-signal'. I want to try and avoid conflicting with the current "^widget-.*" namespace if at all possible. What do people think the namespace should be? UI? GUI? SBH (stupid bill hack :) -Bill P.