# GTK "Preferences Dialog"

Alain

## Requirements

- The window should fit 800x600 screen configurations.

- The preferences should be consistent troughout the dialog, honored and refreshed.

- All preferences types should be "bug free" !

## Current implementation

### Size

Size requested: 780x550. Realized so far : 780x591

There is a "dynamic area" in `Config PoV` where all the widgets needed to edit different data types are created, but then, only displayed

GTK realizes all those widgets, which is taking a lot of Y space, while during real user interaction, only a few widgets are displayed, minimising the required Y space…​ I tried to connect a `realize` signal to recalculate the widget size, but does not seem to work :(

### Jump on `Save`

In `User PoV`, when clicking on `Save in config` ?? (else too ?) there is an ugly workaround:

The whole preferences dialog was designed to be built up once, with all values copied from core to GTK then copied back from GTK to core on dialog close. This means if any value is updated on the fly, it’s not trivial to make sure the gtk mirror is updated.

As a workaround, we just force it in a state that the tabs need to be re-created.

This is not nice, but the real fix would be very expensive. The config system is strong on this, it supports calling back functions on config value changes, so it would be easy to get the conf system to notify the gtk code when the change happens. But on the GTK side we don’t have any infra or code for this. And a partial solution wouldn’t help - if we wanted to do this, we’d need to do this for all values, including the tricky ones (prio lists even in the config pov section). Would take weeks or even months to get it right. Not sure it is worth the effort.

So, on save, the dialog is destroyed and recreated, jumping at the same tab in the tree view. This has some bugs. FIXME them !

On the other hand, there could be yet another workaround on this: we could remember what tree node was open when we triggered this, and then after the rebuild, we could just open that again. Go Alain !

### Problems with some types

- increments

- layers

- groups

### Code explanation

`static GtkWidget *config_window;`

is the total dialog window.

## TODO