PyGTK: Packing widgets before tabs in a gtk.Notebook

Basically, what I want to do is put some buttons before the tabs in a gtk.Notebook. I tried making my own notebook type widget and it w开发者_开发百科orked well, but it would have required lots more work to make it as flexible as I would like, also it wasn't as efficient.

Here is a mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve: http://imagebin.ca/view/84SC0d.html

Any ideas would be much appreciated, thanks.

Ben.

You might be interested to know that this functionality has been added in GTK 2.20, see "Changes in GtkNotebook" in the following announcement: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2010-March/msg00132.html

It's a hack, but you can put your widgets on a separate tab, and then prevent the tab from being clicked by registering the following switch-page event for the notebook:

def onTabsSwitchPage(self, notebook, page_notUsableInPython, pageNumber):
    # Don't allow to switch to the dummy tab containing widgets
    if pageNumber == <put correct tab number here>:
        notebook.stop_emission("switch-page")

Note that this doesn't look good with all GTK themes, but it works...

I don't think there's any way to do it without making your own notebook widget. There are a couple of hacks. One was posted by AndiDog. Another is to hide the tabs altogether (notebook.set_show_tabs(False)) and make a toolbar with buttons above the widget, with your buttons on the left, plus one button for each tab in the notebook that switches to that page.

Instead of making your own notebook-type widget from scratch, you could inherit from gtk.Notebook, overriding some of the methods like expose_event, size_request, and size_allocate, in order to deal with two types of container children: pages and buttons. I don't know how to do this in PyGTK though, only in C.

You might also consider whether the buttons in the tab space are really what you want. What if the user resizes your notebook small enough that some of the tabs disappear? Where do the previous tab/next tab arrows go? What happens to the buttons?