[Glade-devel] Rubberband Selection Solution?

[Tristan Van Berkom]

Eric Jardim wrote:
> On 5/25/05, Andy Somerville <andy.somerville at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> 1 - using a rubberband selection may tell the user that she can select more 
> than one widget. I think it is not possible by now with glade. And even if 
> it is possible, multi-selection of widgets is not very useful on GUI 
> editing. Generally it is confusing and the expected results are ambiguous 
> (except from deleting). Another thing: how do you will select hidden widgets 
> like menuitems and expander children?

     Multiple selection exists and is functional, cut/copy/delete are
pretty obvious, paste was a little tricky; right now multiple paste
(wich is based on multiple /clipboard/ selection) will only work if
there are enough placeholders in the target container to be replaced by
widgets. (except if they are non gtkcontainer-gtkwidget relationships,
in which case there is no restriction).

[...]
> 4 - what about more druids. There could be druids for repetitive actions 
> like creating actions/groups, menus, toolbars...

     This is another topic that needs to be addressed; custom editors
right now are lacking in glade-3, I have a couple of weird ideas
of how to handle these all genericly that I'd be willing to discuss
if someone was about to write the code.

My personal thoughts on this atm are:
     - its probably going to take alot of effort to implement and the
       feature to me isnt all that attractive, I definitly dont want
       to sacrifice code simplicity for such a feature.

     - if it were possible to implement cleanly without too much
       special casing & code fragmentation, I'd suggest the following
       functionality:
          the rubber band always selects the highest level widget in the
          hierarchy that is completely inside the rubber band, selected
          widget's children dont recieve selection.
       that seems to make sence to me if your going to copy/paste them
       (since copies are recursive).


Cheers,
                                    -Tristan