[Gtk-sharp-list] textbuffer urls

[Chris Howie]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 5:03 PM, jmauster<evan.arnold at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm building out a textbuffer to be a rich text editor. How do I apply a tag
> which functions as a link? (For functionality much like the Add Link button
> at the top of this post...)  Or to put it more technically, how do I apply
> hyperlinks in textbuffers?
>
> You'd be surprised at how hard it is to google textbuffer & link, or
> textbuffer & url, or textbuffer & hyperlink, as these always result in posts
> with people talking about posts regarding textbuffers in general.
>
> And guidance will be much appreciated!

I don't have the time to dig into the API at the moment, but I can
give you a basic outline of what you need to do using what I remember
of the API.

To create a link:

* Create a TextTag with no name ("new TextTag(null)").
* Set the visual appearance you want (blue, underlined, etc.).
* Store the hyperlink target somewhere, probably a Dictionary<TextTag,
string> would be the most useful.
* Don't forget to add the tag to the TextBuffer.TagTable.
* Apply the tag to the text where you want the link.

Then during construction of the buffer you need to attach a handler to
the mouse movement signal (I forget what it's called) as well as the
clicked signal.  When either are fired you will have to:

* Obtain the X,Y coordinates of the movement/click.
* Map these somehow to a TextIter.

Then, in the movement handler you will then want to conditionally set
the mouse pointer to the "hand" pointer or the normal one, based on
whether or not a hyperlink tag is present.  You could use a LINQ query
to determine this, something like "bool hyperlink = (from i in
iter.Tags where dictionary.ContainsKey(i) select i).FirstOrDefault()
!= null;" (this is from memory, you may have to tweak it).

In the click handler you can do something like "TextTag linktag =
(from i in iter.Tags where dictionary.ContainsKey(i) select
i).FirstOrDefault();" and then if linktag != null you can do "string
url = dictionary[linktag];" to obtain the URL you stored and use it
however you wish.

Don't forget that when you remove text containing a link you should
remove the TextTag from the TextBuffer.TagTable and also
dictionary.Remove(tag).

Hope this helps!

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers