Gtk+ Thorns

This page is an informal list of things that have been identified as annoying about Gtk+ that are difficult to change at this time out of concern for compatibility. We keep this list so that we know what we should break at the next major version bump.

• GtkWidget should not have event signals (eg: 'button-press-event'). Probably only GtkWindow should have that.

• GtkToggleButton, GtkCheckMenuItem and GtkToggleToolButton are really annoying. Specifically: the fact that setting the state directly functions by checking if the requested state is unequal to the current state and calling activate().

• It is essentially impossible to create a composite widget without subclassing GtkContainer.

• The geometry widget functionality requires absolute insanity pushed through several layers of Gtk to implement and is used by very very few applications (which could do the equivalent work in a less-hacky way for themselves).
• The xshape calls have _combine_ in the name in a confusing way. They should be renamed to _set_.