[wishlist] Make input textbox manually resizable

[Rory McCann]

If you have are typing a long message the text input box will accept it all and scroll. However this can be hard to see what you wrote at the start. The Pidgin IM client has (controversially) approached this problem by making the input box automatically grow vertically to accomodate the extra text. I propose something similar for gwibber.

I don't think this is possible with a normal Entry widget. I think you'd have to use TextView, but then it's not as simple to change text in in the code (ie can't do self.input.set_text(...)), so right now it's not a drop in replacemnent.

[Ryan Paul (segphault)]

Automatic resizing is not something I'm willing to adopt. It's far too difficult to implement correctly and it's a non-standard behavior that is confusing to users.

I might be willing to consider a manually resizable TextView as an option, but it would probably create problems. I used a TextView in the very first version of Gwibber and it was kind of a pain. Adopting TextView would also deprive us of the spellcheck feature, so I honestly don't think it's worth the sacrifices. If somebody wants to implement it as an option, I'll seriously consider merging it in. You get bonus points if you can find a way to make it support spellcheck.

[Steve Smith (tarkasteve)]

There is a development branch for a separate message-input component which uses a resizable TextView here:

    https://code.launchpad.net/~tarkasteve/gwibber/message-component

Feedback welcome.

[Fernando Miguel (fernandomiguel)]

Since we now support Jaiku back, it would be great if the reply limit was removed.

[Steve Smith (tarkasteve)]

A minor update:

I'm not actively working on the 'message-component' until after the 1.0 release as keeping it in sync is too much work and error prone. Once Gwibber is open for 'next-gen' work I'll resync then.

[Ryan Paul (segphault)]

@Steve: if you ping me in the #gwibber IRC channel (irc.arstechnica.com) we can talk about version syncing and what you should be targeting. We have already technically done the 1.0 release. We are currently preparing to branch a 1.5 series which will be somewhat stable. I think that it would be best for you to wait until the new 2.0 user interface overhaul lands in trunk and then you can target that directly. I'd love to have an improved textview component included in our 2.0 release.

[Dalton (daltux)]

I believe this is fixed by Gwibber 2.0.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Its been a while since this got fixed.