[sugar] "TreeView" widget for Sugar and Hierarchy as a Necessary Evil

[Andrew Clunis]

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Hey folks,

Develop currently uses the GTK TreeView to display the directory structure
of the activity the user is hacking on, and one double clicks on rows
display the files for editing, drag and drops for moves, etc.

However, as I understand it, most of the GUI widgets that activities will
be using will not in fact be GTK widgets but will rather will be Hippo
derivative widgets provided by sugar.graphics.

After a long and lengthy war with GTK's TreeView, I've come to realise
that their API blows chunks.

So, I figure we should probably write a Sugar TreeView-ish widget.

Don's pie-menus aren't really appropriate for this task, mostly because
they are very wasteful of screen space.  Thus, they are  better suited
to display menus rather than trees of data.

That said, is a "TreeView" considered a reasonable way to display a
hierachical tree of information?  I know that any form of hierarchial
display is not considered kosher for OLPC, but there's really no
getting around that requirement for Develop.  Unless, of course,
someone can think up a better way of representing a directory structure
(Remember, Develop is a bit of a black-sheep in that it needs to deal
with the guts of the computer, and the Journal isn't really appropriate
for storing Python packages and modules directly).

Develop's current (and very traditional IDE-style) interface:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Develop-activity-very-early.png

Eben, I would greatly appreciate any insight into how I can make this
better. :D

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Regards,
Andrew Clunis

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