[mcclim-devel] A few questions

[Žiga Lenarčič]

Hi McCLIM developers!

I have a few questions, in no particular order:


* I've started 'theming' McCLIM to give it a more modern look (a  
darker look).. I've started with /Looks/pixie.lisp and went from  
there. Is pixie.lisp an example of 'correct' skinning process -  
effectively creating new classes with overridden methods for various  
things or is it better to just redefine the handle-redraw methods of  
original gadgets and be done with it? Pixie has a problem for  
instance - mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work, because it  
reimplements scrolling logic implemented in gadgets.lisp or somewhere  
else. Wouldn't it be more correct to use the 'default' logic and only  
redefine handle-repaint methods, if change in functionality isn't  
needed?

* what is the correct way to add my own widgets? I assume I should  
look at gadgets.lisp and start from there. Are new widgets welcome in  
the main McCLIM source tree or is McCLIM closely following some CLIM  
specification and doesn't want to go beyond that?

* I'm using CLX backend and default/freetype/truetype font  
renedering. I've noticed that with default X11 font rendering, the  
usual textstyle (sans-serif, roman) is much more readable at  
size :small, than :normal. For antialiased fonts, :normal works  
great. Perhaps the default fontsize should be :small (or mcclim's clx  
default font render should just interpret :normal as :small) - clim- 
examples applications would look nicer out of the box and I wouldn't  
need to write cases in my app (if ''freetype'' :normal :small) to  
make stuff look nice. I think this has been mentioned before..

* right now McCLIMs 'textfield' is vastly different from text fields  
in other toolkits. I think we could conform better if the caret was  
just a line (not a block), if the caret blinked properly, if there  
was caret positioning via mouse click and if there was selection  
possible. I don't know how other McCLIM users feel about this - but  
if I added these features, would they be added to McCLIM? Would it be  
better to add a new 'gadget' for this 'modern' text field stuff?

Regards,
Ziga