CLIM mail archive
[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

apparent omission of a layout pane class


Motif (and probably other GUIs) have two main ways to combine several
panes into a frame.  (In Motif lingo, it's called combining several
widgets into a composite widget.)

1.  The RowColumn Widget.  CLIM is good at this.

2.  The BulletinBoard Widget.  Children are not tiled into rows
    and columns, but rather placed at set positions within
    the coordinate system of the parent.  (They aren't repositionable.)

The latter seems to have been omitted from CLIM.  It would be
particularly useful when you have something like a text-editor
widget or a scrolling-list widget as a part of a larger display.

I just got through a painful clim 1 exercise of putting a scrolling
application pane in the middle of a frame, like this:

 ------------------
 |                |
 |   ---------    |
 |   |       |    |
 |   |       |    |
 |   |       |    |
 |   ---------    |
 |                |
 ------------------

I had to do this by making nine panes, eight of which do not draw their
borders, but all of which have a nontrivial display function.
I needed to draw a rectangle around the ninth
pane, and this involved drawing the pieces of the rectangle using
each of the eight surrounding display functions.

I would have rather had just two application panes, the outer of which
was essentially an application pane with its own display function
(and a single coordinate system) and with a "hole" cut out of it's
middle for the inner pane.  Drawing in the "hole" would be allowed
but would just get clipped.

I'm not generally one to want more CLIM features, but BulletinBoard
widgets seem almost indispensible in in a tutorial Motif book I have
been studying.

jeff morrill
jmorrill@bbn.com


0,,
Follow-Ups:
Main Index | Thread Index