Currently, if you want a custom GtkButton with an image (ie. non-stock image and/or label) you have to use the standard container facilities.

This leads to unnecessary copmplex layouts and additionally makes such buttons ignore the gtk-button-images xsetting, for example. As a work-around you can set the image through code instead of through glade, but that's far from nice.

The following patch adds support to libglade to simply use an internal child image using gtk_button_set_image (). Prior to tha patch you had to do it like this:

<widget class="GtkButton" id="some_button">
  <property name="visible">True</property>
  ...
  <child>
    <widget class="GtkAlignment" id="alignment">
      <child>
        <widget class="GtkHBox" id="hbox">
          <property name="visible">True</property>
          <property name="homogeneous">False</property>
          <property name="spacing">2</property>

          <child>
            <widget class="GtkImage" id="some_image">
              <property name="visible">True</property>
              <property name="stock">gtk-revert-to-saved</property>
              <property name="icon_size">4</property>
            </widget>
          </child>

          <child>
            <widget class="GtkLabel" id="label">
              <property name="visible">True</property>
              <property name="label" translatable="yes">_Awesome</property>
              ...
            </widget>
          </child>
        </widget>
      </child>
    </widget>
  </child>
</widget>

With the patch applied it becomes much simpler and works correctly with the xsetting:

<widget class="GtkButton" id="some_button">
  <property name="visible">True</property>
  <property name="label" translatable="yes">_Awesome</property>
  ...

  <child internal-child="image">
    <widget class="GtkImage" id="some_image">
      <property name="visible">True</property>
      <property name="stock">gtk-bla</property>
      <property name="icon_size">4</property>
    </widget>
  </child>
</widget>