pcb-rnd devlog

dynamic gtk menus

by Igor2

As described in the previous post, pcb-rnd will feature dynamic menus. I first implemented this in the gtk hid.

It turned out gtk was way too OOP for my taste¹. It took about 6 hours total, to implement and debug the feature. (As a comparison, it took about 90 minutes to make the research related to the resource structs in PCB and implement the HID modifications for the new hid command). The trickiest part was to figure the need of calling a show() on the menubar after adding the new items.

When I didn't have that, only plain action menu/submenus showed up (in already existing menu/ widgets), but new (main) menus and menu/submenu/submenus didn't. After many hours of gdb sessions I finally made sure (by printing all the widgets to stderr recursively) that:

I am really adding the new widgets...
... under the right parent
... with the right properties

Then I also printed allocated dimensions and coordinates - but the values were misleading. Finally I figured there was different flags like realization and visibility, so printed them too. This revealed that all my new menus were there in an invisible state.

Footnotes

¹: not because of the show() call, but because of the way objects are stored in memory: too many generic pointers casted forth and back, makes it really hard to print all properties of a menu item (including its label) with gdb.