On Fri, 16 Jun 2017 19:06:14 +0100
Chris Austin <chris@...> wrote:

> On Wednesday 14 Jun 2017 12:35:12 Timothy Pearson wrote:
> > We need to plan out a roadmap to determine whether or not we should be
> > trying to get e.g. GTK3 into a form we can use as the backend and common
> > interface to third party programs like LibreOffice.

> I expected to see the very clumsy and awkward Gnome/GTK system for resizing 
> windows by dragging their borders, but instead, I saw the nice KDE/TDE system.  
> This appears to be because TDE puts its own border right round the GEdit 
> window.  

That's because that functionality is (or should be) controlled by the
window manager, not the widget set.

>But this comes at a price.  The GEdit window now has two title bars: 
> the TDE title bar, and below that, what is presumably the GEdit title bar, 
> which takes a lot of space to repeat the filename, for no useful purpose.  This 
> GEdit title bar is about twice the height of the TDE title bar.

That's a problem with your distro, your GTK3 style, or GEdit itself--I just
tested a recent Abiword on Gentoo with my homerolled GTK3 style, and
got no such doubling.

> Instead of a menu bar and toolbar, the GEdit title bar has a button for a file 
> open dialogue, a peculiar button that a tooltip indicates is to create a new 
> file, a Save button, and a button with three horizontal lines on it, which 
> drops down a primitive menu, which looks roughly like a truncated or merged 
> form of some of the items from the menus in the KEdit menu bar.

Also a style- or application-specific thing--Abiword gives me a normal menu,
not a hamburger button.
 
> The GEdit file open dialogue initially shows no files at all, and you have to 
> click on the Other Documents ... button at the bottom, to get a file picker.  
> And if you don't like the file picker in LibreOffice, this one is far worse.  It 
> is basically the same as the LibreOffice file picker, but WITHOUT the field where 
> you can paste in the name of the required file, as in the trick to open a file 
> fast in LibreOffice, which I described in another message in this thread.  So in 
> my home directory with 8804 files and directories, I just get those 8804 files 
> and directories in a vertical list, which I have to comb through to find the 
> required file, and there is no short cut.

Yes, the default file dialog is bad--no argument there!  It could be 
reimplemented starting from basic widgets, although I'm not sure if
it's worth it.

> Do I understand correctly, that in my installation of TDE R14.0.4 in Debian 
> 8.7, what is really happening is that I have Qt version 4.8.6 running in the 
> background, and Trinity Qt (TQt) is wrapping that, so that it looks like Qt 3 
> to the Trinity desktop and the KDE 3.5 apps?
> 
> Or do I actually have BOTH Qt 3 and Qt 4 installed, and the main benefit of the 
> TQt layer is to resolve the Qt3 and Qt4 symbol collisions when Qt4 is 
> installed alongside Qt3?  (That is what 
> https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Understanding_the_TQT_Interface seems to say.)

TQT was an attempt to prevent symbol collisions when using Qt3 and
Qt4 widgets in the same program.  This would have allowed (in theory
and at the time) things like relatively easy embedding of modern WebKit 
into Qt3 applications.  The development team was just never big enough 
to take advantage of the idea.  Trinity is still using Qt3, just with TQT as
an intermediate layer.

> Is being able to use Qt4 applications in TDE, like I am, something that was 
> not actually planned, but works anyway, due to the TQt layer?

You can run any program using any widget set under any desktop environment.  
The underlying X server doesn't care.  Trinity makes some attempt to integrate
Qt4 applications a little better visually with the desktop default, that's all.  It's
just theming support.

E. Liddell