Re: [Tile-dev] a tale of 2 trees

[Will D. <Wil...@jp...>]

Jeff,

You keep talking about directory browsing, which is an application
for which a tree is useful but which involves considerably more than
basic tree behavior.  treectrl supports this, and treeview doesn't.

I think the basic problem here is that although both widgets have
"tree" in their name, treectrl *isn't* a "tree" widget.  You can use
it for that; but it's really something more powerful, and perhaps should
have a name that indicates that.

Frankly, I can see a place in Tk/Ttk for both widgets.  A simple one,
akin to the standard Tk listbox, and a complex but vastly more powerful
one.

Will

On Nov 21, 2006, at 4:02 PM, Jeff Hobbs wrote:

> Tim Baker wrote:
>> Jeff Hobbs wrote:
>>> 2.2).  However, if I only needed what a "simpler" treeview would  
>>> provide,
>>> and
>>> it provided it with a memory size of ~20MB for the same app ... does  
>>> that
>>> not justify a simpler, dedicated widget?
>>>
>>> Therein lies the real question - if we strongly feel that a simple
> dedicated
>>> and mega configurable tree widgets (2 separate) are both valuable,  
>>> let's
>>> get treeview in 8.5, and treectrl in 8.6.
>>
>> Is it only the [style] and [element] commands that blows
>> treectrl out of the "simple" space into "mega-configurable"?
>> The high memory requirements are mostly a result of styles
>> and elements. Whenever people comment that treectrl
>> is difficult to use I start brainstorming alternate APIs. It
>> always comes down to a question of how much control over the
>> appearance of items is desired.
>
> Therein does lie the question.  To be honest, I have very little  
> exposure to
> the treeview widget, whereas I have done quite a bit with treectrl.  I  
> have
> some comfort that ActiveState's use of treectrl has stressed it to  
> find weak
> points (and resolve them for the most part).
>
> I don't know much about treeview's track record.  I do know that the  
> little
> bits I've seen always had /something/ wrong with them.  The
> demos/dirbrowser.tcl doesn't scroll right on Windows (adds too much  
> space at
> the end), doesn't seem to handle the +/- stuff right, the headers have  
> several
> issues ...  Anecdotally, for those who have had treeview and treectrl
> available to them, where treectrl was too complicated to master, they  
> more
> often turned to BWidget's tree (or tablelist if appropriate) than use  
> treeview
> due to its lack of features.
>
> I will deconstruct the treeview "oversimplicity" from the dir browser
> perspective, since I have done directory views with treectrl.
>
> * The handling of the sort arrow is a built-in feature in treectrl.  In
> treeview (like tktable), you would have to manage the same yourself  
> with the
> -image stuff (which can only be placed left of the label).
>
> * The columns - how do you specify which one has weight?  Resize and  
> shrink
> behavior?  This is all possible in treectrl, but doesn't appear to be  
> in
> treeview.
>
> * Is it possible with treeview to give a full single column a  
> background
> without tagging each item (as one would do to indicate the current sort
> column)?
>
> * No x scrolling in treeview?
>
> * Auto-ellipsing, or other detection on truncation for treeview?
>
> * They do both have column and element visibility control.
>
> * Any row/column spanning in treeview?
>
> Except for the last one, the rest would all be desirable in the most  
> generic
> of directory browsers.  While it is certainly possible to address the  
> above
> issues, is there time to do it?  What about taking that time and  
> working on
> ttk::dialog, ttk::toplevel, ttk::menu, etc?
>
> Jeff
>
>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will Duquette, JPL  | Wil...@jp...
But I speak only    | http://eis.jpl.nasa.gov/~will (JPL Use Only)
for myself.         | It's amazing what you can do with the right tools.