From: Kevin Smith <sent@...>
Date: 2000-12-23T16:33:47+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7996] I ported my app from Tk to GTK

Well, porting my little app from Tk to GTK took 
about three hours. No major problems, and all-in-
all the app is slightly more attractive and well-
behaved. Here are the gotchas I encountered (of 
course, one or more of them may be my own 
misunderstandings):

1. Gtk::CList does not seem to have a "get 
selected" method, nor a "size" method like Tk. So 
I had to catch the select and unselect events and 
remember the current item for myself. And I had 
to keep track of the row count myself, also. It 
seems like I must just be missing something.

2. Based on the C API, I was expecting to find a 
method named CList#remove but it is actually 
CList#remove_row. 

3. The default size for the Text widget is really 
small. So I have to create default sizes for my 
outer windows to make it reasonable.

4. Widget creation is a bit different. In Tk, you 
specify the parent as part of the .new call. With 
GTK, you create the widget, and later tell the 
parent to add the widget to itself. 

And the stuff where GTK really helped me out:

1. GTK does not require the distinction between 
root and toplevel. 

2. GTK has a really cool multi-column listbox. 
Really, really cool.

3. GTK has a ScrolledWindow class that is great 
for quickly and painlessly adding scrollbars to 
text boxes and list boxes.

I think that's it. The code seems cleaner to me. 
Perhaps it's just because GTK uses a paradigm 
that's closer to other GUI systems I've used in 
the past. 

The available C documentation also seems to map 
more directly to Ruby/GTK than the Perl/Tk 
documentation did to Ruby/Tk.

Kevin