GTK+ Forums

anewguy · Joined: 05 May 2008 Posts: 2

I'm a beginner at all of this, and extremely rusty at C, so please bear with me. :wink:

I have a main function which does all the GTK stuff to define a window with 2 buttons and a scrolling window with a text view. These 3 areas are within a vbox. For ease in this question, call back function when button 1 is pressed in "B1", a separate C file from the main.c. B1 in turn calls other separate .C files, any of which may output a text status message to the text view. I have the widgets globally declared. If B1 or any of the other functions issues a message, it goes through a common C function to post it into the text view buffer.

The problem I am having is that nothing is displayed in the text view until the original call back function exits. How do I make these status messages show "real-time"?

I have tried showing the buffer, the scrolled window, the vbox and the window (even all together!) in the logging function but nothing shows.

Thanks for the input! :D

Micah Carrick · Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 7:27 pm Post subject:

It's hard to say without looking at your code, however, I can give you a few pointers.

First, rather than declaring your widgets as globals (that could get quite "big") we often use a structure declared in main() and pass it to our callback functions as user_data. An example of using this method can be seen in Execute command into a GtkTextView (C and Libglade)

As for making sure the status bar is updated quickly, you might want to use this handy bit of code.

Code: (C)
1	while (gtk_events_pending ()) gtk_main_iteration();

This will allow your UI to catch up should you be in the middle of processing something. We use this quite often for things like status bar messages and progress bars. If you put that immediately after the code that adds text to the text view, it might solve your problem.

anewguy · Joined: 05 May 2008 Posts: 2

Thanks, Micah!! The last statement did the trick for the immediate problem.

I'll have to think on the structure thing a bit - if call back function A1 in turn uses functions B1 through Z1, and all of them need to post a message, but the message is posted through a common routine, I thought the globals were easier than changing every function call to include the structure (unless it was made global, at which point it would be self-defeating, wouldn't it?).

I'm so rusty at C and this is my first experience with GTK (using in Ubuntu Linux to "talk" to CVS one-time use video and still digital cameras) to make a GUI.

Thanks again! Any suggestions are greatly appreciated by this old man! :)