Proposal: submit for uiForm

[emersion]

Right now pressing the Enter key when typing in a uiForm does nothing. It should submit the form.

One solution would be to add a uiFormOnSubmitted function that calls the callback when Enter is pressed in the form's uiEntry childs. A uiFormSubmit function can be added to submit the form when clicking a button.

Thoughts?

[andlabs]

uiForm does not have a concept of submitting, because it is purely a layout container.

What you are describing would be done with the "default button" of a dialog. When I add custom dialogs, you will be able to do exactly this, and with any layout container.

[PaulBGD]

Custom dialogs sound awesome! You see them a lot in GTK and macOS. Do you have any sort of ETA on those?

[andlabs]

No, because dialogs are held up by OSs being highly incompatibly different with issues of modality. I don't know how to solve it, and explaining it will be more complex than explaining the menu issue.

[bcampbell]

I'm looking at some tangentially dialog-related issues at the moment, so I'll add my notes here for future reference:

On Gtk, there's GtkDialog:

• it has one upper area for adding custom widget layouts
• it has one lower area, a horizontal box for adding buttons which submit the dialog, each with it's own user-defined ID (eg ok, cancel, replace, retry, yes, no, whatever)
• the dialog can be either modal or non-modal
• GtkEntry widgets in the upper area can be set to activate the default dialog button (the entry widget has a activates-default boolean property to set this behavour). Not sure about other widget types.
• the dialog emits a response signal when a dialog button (in the bottom area) is activated.
• the dialog emits a close signal when the dialog is closed (eg, by pressing escape).

Seems quite nice and simple, and easy to understand. At first glance, anyway ;-) If libui could have a model along these lines I'd be pretty happy, but need to see what windows and osx do.

[bcampbell]

I think the NSPanel window subclass is the OSX equivalent:

• How Panels Work
• can be run modal or non-modal
• some controls eg NSTextField look like they'll activate the panel's default action when enter is pressed. See textDidEndEditing.

[bcampbell]

Windows Dialog Box reference

• can be modal or non-modal ('modeless')
• seems really biased toward constucting the dialog layout using dialog templates from resource files. Ugh. Not clear to me yet if you can populate a dialog box layout programatically.
• Raymond Chen has what looks like a great multipart blog series on dialogs starting here: The dialog manager, part 1: Warm-ups (index here to the whole series)

[bcampbell]

Looks like on windows you can, in fact, subclass the Dialog Box and create the layout yourself without faffing about with a dialog template.

• Example: http://zetcode.com/gui/winapi/dialogs/
• another Raymond Chen post on subclassing Dialogs: 'Another different type of dialog procedure'

[andlabs]

GTK+: you do not have to follow the standard widget layout for dialog boxes. You don't even have to use GtkDialog as GtkWindow already has all the relevant properties in it, but I forget if there are any edge cases that make this not-ideal.

Windows: you do not have to use the dialog template system at all. In fact, you don't even have to use WC_DIALOG; Raymond Chen has a series of articles in which you recreate the functionality of the DialogBox() function!

The platform-incompatible issues I mentioned are much more subtle than anything you listed here. I can talk about them in more detail later.