GTK Emacs: toolbar disappears in GTK2 "Text Only" mode

GTK Emacs: toolbar disappears in GTK2 "Text Only" mode

[Alex Lancaster]

After "cvs update"-ing CVS HEAD, I attempted a clean build with GTK
engaged (after removing my old Emacs build and installation
directory), using "configure/make bootstrap".

$ ~/src/remote-cvs/gnu.org/emacs/configure --prefix=/opt/EmacsCVS --with-gtk
$ make bootstrap
$ sudo make install

I then ran the installed version:

$ /opt/EmacsCVS/bin/emacs -q

I can see the toolbar (and the tooltips are there), but none of the
toolbar pixmap icons appear, just little button-like squares appear
(with associated tooltips) under my mouse as I scan across the
toolbar.

I eventually realised that this was due to my GTK "Menu and Toolbar
Preferences" "Button Labels" was set to "Text Only".  This is OK for
most other GTK2 apps, which already have text versions of the buttons,
but in the case of Emacs, this just causes the buttons to become
almost invisible, since there doesn't appear to be alternative text
versions of these buttons.

I think Emacs should do a combination of two things in this situation:

1. have a separate variable to override/ignore the GTK2 preference,
   and display the icons regardless of the "Button Label" preference

2. supply "text-only" versions of the pixmaps so the toolbar looks OK
   when "Text Only" buttons are selected

My preference is that the default be (2), as it would make Emacs
behave consistently with respect to other GTK2 applications.  An
additional (non-default) option could be added to support (1).  This
would seem to add the maximum configurability whilst retaining the
consistent GTK2 behaviour.

The behaviour should certainly not be left as it is, because the
toolbar basically becomes invisible when the GTK2 preference is
switched leading to confusion (as it clearly did in my case).

Otherwise, very nice job on the toolbar!  It's great to be able to
tear it off like a regular GTK app!

Alex

Re: GTK Emacs: toolbar disappears in GTK2 "Text Only" mode

[Jan D.]

> 
> I think Emacs should do a combination of two things in this situation:
> 
> 1. have a separate variable to override/ignore the GTK2 preference,
>    and display the icons regardless of the "Button Label" preference
> 
> 2. supply "text-only" versions of the pixmaps so the toolbar looks OK
>    when "Text Only" buttons are selected
> 
> My preference is that the default be (2), as it would make Emacs
> behave consistently with respect to other GTK2 applications.  An
> additional (non-default) option could be added to support (1).  This
> would seem to add the maximum configurability whilst retaining the
> consistent GTK2 behaviour.
> 
> The behaviour should certainly not be left as it is, because the
> toolbar basically becomes invisible when the GTK2 preference is
> switched leading to confusion (as it clearly did in my case).

For now, I had to go for (1), i.e. force display of icons.  There is no
suitable text to show.  The tool bar items in Emacs have captions that
I considered first, but the Gtk tool bar makes every item the same size,
so the longest caption determines the size of the tool bar.  Emacs captions
tend to be on the long side, like "Save (current buffer)".  Although
I have a rather small font, this made the tool bar much longer than
the screen (1280 pixels).

	Jan D.