[TCLCORE] Re: RFC: Tk extension to listbox

[Jeffrey H. <jef...@aj...>]

	...
> In this case, I favor George's, not because of any 
> inherent problems with TkTable, but because George's links in with 
> his Tree widget, and a nice Tree-driven table widget is something 
> that Tk really needs...

For a multi-column listbox, I favor neither (although the BLT
hiertable is closer functionally), for one simple reason: they lack
the necessary correct LaF on any platform.  For Windows you can see
why they are off (although tktable has such a plethora of options
to support it, getting the look and feel shouldn't be so tedious).
You can argue that anything is correct on Unix, but we're seeing an
outpouring of community opinion that Gtk is the right LaF to follow.
It's hard to disagree with this, considering all the major companies
that want to standardize on it as the next common unix desktop
toolkit (dropping Motif finally).  I plead ignorance on the Mac.

It's been great to have the extensive collection of widgets available,
but when we consider putting it in the core (and having something
like the mclistbox is without a doubt important to most Tk users),
we have to make sure it comes out of the box like they "expect" it.

George's hiertable is probably a good place to start.  Then you want
to look at the native widgets and see how close we are to *exactly*
duplicating them, and what the code looks like to get there.  Trust
me, people will complain when the tree dotted line spacing is just
one or two pixels off from that in Explorer, or the image/text spacing
is too much.  Look at the discussions about buttons right now on the
newsgroup (a default Tk button on Windows is not exactly the same size
as native).

A tree and table would also be good widgets to have (note that tree
is on the 8.4 list), but we needn't make the tree and mclistbox the
same widget if it compromises ease of use or LaF.  However, if it
doesn't, that's a win for developer and user.

Jeff

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