Is there a minibuffer widget with all the completion display stuff etc.? What would be the point of reinventing it in gtk except being buzzword
complicant with the "Modern" Desktop paradigm, something that Ion tries
to do away with?
I have no goal to be buzzword compliant :-)
I will have to investigate as to whether gtk text entry widgets allow tab completions (I'm reasonably sure that they do). If so, all that's required is a gtk-compatible wrapper around the lua completion code. Maybe 50 lines of C at the most.
There is nothing about GTK that enforces or even implies use of a "Modern" Desktop paradigm. My GTK apps run just fine in Ion :-) My interest in it is that it provides a rich high-level API which I can use to write powerful code quickly.
For example, should I decide that I want to use a background image for my tabs (not that I want to) I can use the gdk-pixbuf library for all the image loading, rescaling, and drawing to the screen. I don't have to write the image loading code myself. If I want to draw a UTF-8 I can do just that -- I don't have to worry about iconv and X fontsets and the like. There are already hundreds of themes for GTK, some of which even look OK, that could be used to theme Ion too. Basically, I want to make Ion look prettier but I'm lazy!
My "grand idea" is to use librsvg for drawing tabs and frames, which is gdk-dependent, but looks great and is arguably simpler than the current drawing engine: all the code to draw raised/lowered/indented/whatever borders is already included in librsvg.
I love ion and the ion paradigm. Some window dressing would look good, impress my friends and attract new users, which means more pressure on application writers to write ICCCM-compliant apps so they play nice with ion.
-- Tom
