Why do people like MDI applications?
I recently decided to hack on an application I'm using which is in the
early stages of development. It's a Gtk application which uses glade, a
GUI editor thing, to define the windows. I hadn't used glade for years
and when I did its hate was minimal and bearable.
Now it is on version 3 and where previously it had palette and properties
windows, it now has one big window with everything bolted into it,
leaving me with the choice of having 3 inches of horizontal space in
which to fit the windows I am editing and/or squashing the palette and
widget properties windows to useless widths on the side, and then
resizing each frame when I needed to use it.
No thanks. There must be some way to detach these things. That was all
the rage in gtk 1 when the gimp was fresh.
How about preferences. What's that? Glade doesn't have any? Have
developers (this application is solely for developers) become so stupid
that the morons who vomit out gnome code think they can't cope with
*any* options now?
Retards.
Well it's often happened that an otherwise not entirely hateful
application has had the useful options hidden away so that they can only
be accessed with the registry^Wgconf editor so maybe the 'protect users
from themselves' option can be disabled from there.
Opening the apps tree, there is no entry in there for glade.
Odd. Maybe it's hidden away deep in the tree as an extra layer of
protection.
$ find .gconf* -iname \*glade\*
$
Nope.
Well maybe it has its own configuration file. I thought gtk apps didn't
like those any more but maybe this one decided to be different[0].
$ ls .glade*
ls: cannot access .glade*: No such file or directory
Wtf? Applications love to remember which off-screen hideaway they
previously inhabited so they can return there when you next open
them. (checks). Yup. This is one of them. It must save those settings
somewhere.
$ ls .*/*glade*
.config/glade-3.conf
Where the hell did .config come from?
So let me see, we have:
/etc (and /usr/local/etc, /opt/etc and whichever hateful system-wide
locations $vendor choose)
~/.<application>
~/.<application>rc [1]
~/.<application>.rc [1]
~/.<application>/*
~/.<application>.d/* [2]
~/.kde/I don't know what the hell is under here
~/.gnome/*
~/.gnome2/*
~/.gnome2_private/*
~/.gconf/*
The .g* directories, of course, having gone through n degrees of
reorganisation which some authors upgrade with and some don't because
they don't like the policy author's cat and so everything said policy
author wrote must be wrong.
And now we have .config/ too
...
Matthew
[0] I cannot think of anything coherent to say about this.
[1] And many variations thereon. .cfg, .conf, .config, etc. etc. ad
nauseam
[2] Because otherwise we'd never know it's a directory.
--
I must take issue with the term "a mere child", for it has been my
invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely
preferable to that of a mere adult.
-- Fran Lebowitz
