GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 344017
extending treeview selections
Last modified: 2015-03-08 14:01:08 UTC
The TreeView currently only supports single- or multi-row selections. It is not possible to select e.g. one or more columns or even rectangular areas. Selecting columns is important for a wide range of applications; I personally encounter it it in any kind of application that presents scientific measurement data. If such a generic selection mode could be implemented, then single and multi-row selections would just be a special case, retaining backward-compatibility.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 309474 ***
I don't think this is a duplicate of 309474, as that bug-report requests having cell-renderers that span multiple columns. What _this_ enhancement request here is about, is the ability to select not only rows, but arbitrary cells. If arbitrary is too complicated, then I believe that being able to choose rectangular areas of cells might suffice. Just think of a spreadsheet application where you want to select one or more columns, or a range of data cells, so you can cut/copy/paste their content. Other widget-sets allow such selections (namely QT and wxGTK), and I think that a whole range of GTK-only applications would benefit from such a concept. Most requests for "spreadsheet" widgets are IMHO basically requests for a treeview with instant editing (which is now already possible) and the ability to do arbitrary selections. Currently all functions of GtkTreeView and GtkTreeSelection are focussed on row manipulation, so I admit that this is probably no easy task. I am not really a good C programmer, but if someone ever tackles this task, I will be happy to help out with testing and writing documentation.
The usual answer to this request is that a tree view is not a table widget.
Sigh.... Matthias, I guess you caught my feeble attempt to request table widget features w/o naming it. I got so frustrated over time, seeing all kinds of nice stuff making their way into GTK, yet a very basic thing such as a table widget or maybe only an enhanced treeview as I proposed seems to be no issue at all. I have put so much time into my GTK/pygtk based project for the evaluation of experimental physics data and now I am at the point where I would like to implement some user-friendly data manipulation (cut/copy/paste regions of data), and the treeview-based implementation is always kind of clunky. The only other solution I have seen so far is gtkgrid, which is no longer maintained and will never be official, and the spreadsheet widget from gtkextra, which does not seem to keep up with the high GTK standards. So I thought that a proposal for the extension of the selection mechanism might solve my problem ;-) I repeat my offer to help anyone with testing and/or documentation (and maybe even the code), in case someone implements table-widget features into treeview or creates a table widget.
I don't really see the need for rectangular selections in a tree view. However having a function to set a "selection column" might be nice. In this case only the cells in this column will be selected if the row is selected (think the windows list view in the explorer).
nobody worked on this in a decade