GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 135287
Support for wrapping in GtkToolbar
Last modified: 2013-02-11 03:13:06 UTC
The SWT team provides a java wrapper for the GTK widgets which is used by Eclipse and other products. For cross-platform portability, we require support for wrapping in the GtkToolbar. We currently have support for this on Windows, Mac OSX /Carbon, as well as Motif and Photon (where we use our own emulated toolbar). Eclipse makes extensive use of the wrapped toolbar.
Wrapping in GtkToolbar would require bug 101968. But really, we would never add support where one application could ask for a wrapping toolbar and other applications could ask for the current style of adding an overflow menu. This type of inconsistency doesn't make sense to me. So, really the only possible resolution here would be to *replace* the current overflow menu with wrapping. Why doesn't an overflow menu work for Eclipse? (The overflow menu is actually new in 2.3.x/2.4)
One could make the decision between nothing, overflow and wrapping a setting...
If there is enough vertical room to show the wrapped toolbar items, this is preferable to an overflow menu because it requires fewer clicks by the user and the items are not "hidden". If there is not enough vertical room to show all items, as many items as can be shown through wrapping should be shown and the rest could be available through an overflow menu.
I would imagine that both wrapping and overflow would need to be implemented (and it wouldn't need to be optional). Think for a moment of an undocked Toolbar. Users should be able to resize it any way they wish, and if they want to resize it to a size too small to show all the available icons a then an overflow widget would be shown. (I'm reasonably sure I've seen widgets on Microsoft Windows that behave as am trying to describe and if necesary I will try and provide screenshots of widgets illustrating the kinds of behaviour I believe is needed.) To put it another way I think the overflow would happen pretty much automatically, and for the wrapping to work users would need to grab and resize the toolbar.
closing old bugs