Toolbars

Applications often use Toolbars to provide shortcuts to commonly-used menu items, such as File|Open or File|Save. They contain a row of buttons, usually with an icon. Each toolbar item can have an icon, text, and a tooltip. You will often be able to reuse standard gtkmm stock items such as Gtk::Stock::SAVE.

Elements are inserted by using classes from the Gtk::Toolbar_Helpers namespace. The various helper objects are:

Here's the constructor for Element:

Element(Widget& w,
        const Glib::ustring& tooltip_text=0,
        const Glib::ustring& tooltip_private_text=0);

w is the widget to insert, and tooltip_text is the text for the element's tooltip. You can ignore tooltip_private_text.

The constructors for ButtonElem and ToggleElem are exactly alike; each has three forms. Here are the ButtonElem constructors:

// text + icon
ButtonElem(const Glib::ustring& text,
           Widget        & content,
           SigC::Slot0<void>        callback,
           const Glib::ustring& tooltip_text=0,
           const Glib::ustring& tooltip_private_text=0);

// icon only
ButtonElem(Widget        & content,
           SigC::Slot0<void>        callback,
           const Glib::ustring& tooltip_text=0,
           const Glib::ustring& tooltip_private_text=0);

// text only
ButtonElem(const Glib::ustring& text,
           SigC::Slot0<void>        callback,
           const Glib::ustring& tooltip_text=0,
           const Glib::ustring& tooltip_private_text=0);

The only difference between these is whether they take an icon, text, or both as arguments. text is the text to display below the icon. content is the icon; note that any widget can be inserted here, but generally this will be a pixmap or other display widget. callback is the signal handler to use for the button. tooltip_text will be displayed in the button's tooltip, and you can safely ignore tooltip_private_text.

The RadioElem constructors are the same as those for ButtonElem and RadioElem, but they take an additional argument specifying the group for the radio button. Here they are:

// text + icon
RadioElem(Gtk::RadioButton_Helpers::Group& group,
          const Glib::ustring&      text,
          Widget&             content,
          SigC::Slot0<void>   callback=0,
          const Glib::ustring&      tooltip_text=0,
          const Glib::ustring&      tooltip_private_text=0);

// icon only
RadioElem(Gtk::RadioButton_Helpers::Group& group,
          Widget&             content,
          SigC::Slot0<void>   callback=0,
          const Glib::ustring&      tooltip_text=0,
          const Glib::ustring&      tooltip_private_text=0);

// text only
RadioElem(Gtk::RadioButton_Helpers::Group& group,
          const Glib::ustring&      text,
          SigC::Slot0<void>   callback=0,
          const Glib::ustring&      tooltip_text=0,
          const Glib::ustring&      tooltip_private_text=0);

The group argument is the only addition here; it works exactly like the group argument for normal radio buttons. See the Radio Buttons section for details.

The toolbar's contents are manipulated through an STL-like list, which you can obtain using the tools() method:

ToolList& tools();

For example, to add a text-only button tool to the toolbar, we could write

toolbar.tools().push_back(Gtk::Toolbar_Helpers::ButtonElem(
        "Crash",slot(&crash_cb),"Causes the program to dump core");

Since it's inconvenient to have to type Gtk::Toolbar_Helpers all the time, you might want to add a using declaration. However, don't add a global using namespace Gtk::Toolbar_Helpers declaration; place this only in some localised scope, to avoid clashes with other Helpers namespaces.

Example

Figure 10.3. Toolbar

Source Code