Ruby/GTK2 Tutorial

This document covers the Ruby/GTK2 library used to ease creation of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). GTK+ can create native application on the GNOME Desktop, and also runs great on almost any desktop environment: Linux, Windows, OSX, FreeBSD and more; and using ruby all without and modifications or recompilation! This tutorial is currently being translated from the Japanese version by Laurent Sansonetti.

As of January 2009, brand new material mainly based on Andrew Krause's book Foundations of GTK+ Development is currently being added by Igor Pirnovar. The numbers at the beginning of the top level lines refer to the chapters in Andrew's book, the "warning" street signs (!) mark places where there may be a problem area with the current Ruby 1.8/GNOME2 2-0.17.0-rc1 release used to test examples in this tutorial.

• Introduction
• Getting Started
  • Hello World
  • Theory of Signals and Callbacks
  • Events
  • Stepping Through Hello World
• Moving On
  • More on Signals Handlers
  • An Upgraded Hello World
• Packing Widgets
  • Theory of Packing Boxes
  • Details of Boxes
  • Packing Demonstration Program
  • Packing Using Tables
  • Table Packing Example
• (3) Container Widgets
  • (based on Andrew Krause's book Foundations of GTK+ Development)
    • Decorator Containers
    • Layout Containers
  • Horizontal and Vertical Boxes
  • Horizontal and Vertical Panes
  • Tables
  • Fixed Containers
  • Expanders
  • Handle Boxes
  • Notebooks
  • Event Boxes
• (4) Basic Widgets
  • Toggle Button
    • Mnemonics
  • Check Button
    • Using Stock Items
    • Callbacks And Event Handling
  • Radio Button
  • ** Not a button but vaguely related Button Box
  • ** Font Button (bellow undeer Selector And Chooser ...) (!)
  • Numeric - Text Data Entry
  • Single Line Entry Field
  • Spin Buttons
    • Adjutments
  • Horizontal And Vertical Scales
  • Selector And Chooser Interface And Widgets
  • File Chooser Button
  • Colour Button
    • Modifying the foreground colour of a widget
  • Font Button (!)
  • Test Your Understanding
• (5) Dialogs
  • Creating Your Own Dialogs
    • Modal Or Nonmodal Message Dialogs
    • ** The Gtk::Image Widget
  • Message Dialogues
  • Provide Info About Your Application
    • ** Pixbuf
    • Help Menu Option
  • Types Of File Chooser Dialogues
    • Saving Files
    • Creating a Folder
    • Selecting Multiple Files
  • Collecting Information With Font And Colour Selection Dialogues
    • Colour Selection Dialogues
    • Font Selection Dialogues
    • Modifying font by programmatic means
  • Dialogues With Multiple Pages Using Gtk::Assistant (!)
    • Progress Bar
  • Test Your Understanding
• (6) GLib Short Introduction
  • Environment Variables
  • Timers
  • File Manipulation
    • Error Handling
  • Main Loop
  • Input-Output Channels
• (7) The Text View Widget
  • Scrolled Windows
  • Text Views
    • Text Buffers
    • Text View Properties
    • Pango Tab Arrays (!)
    • Text Iterators and Marks
      • Editing the Text Buffer (!,f)
      • Retrieving Text Iterators and Marks
      • Changing Text Buffer Contents
      • Cutting, Copying and Pasting
      • Searching in the Text Buffer
      • Scrolling the Text Buffer
    • Text Tags
    • Inserting Images
    • Inserting Child Widgets
    • GtkSourceView
    • Test Your Understanding
• (8) The Tree View Widget
  • Parts of a Tree View
    • Gtk::TreeModel
    • Gtk::TreeViewColumn and Gtk::CellRenderer
    • Using Gtk::ListStore
    • Renderers and Columns (!)
    • Creating the Gtk::ListStore
  • Using Gtk::TreeStore
    • Data Organization Within a Tree Store
    • Multidimensional Tree Store
  • Referencing Rows
    • Tree Path
    • Tree Iterators
    • Tree Row References
  • Adding Rows and Handling Selections
    • Single Selections
    • Multiple Selections
    • Adding New Rows
    • Combo Box
    • Removing Multiple Rows
  • Editable Text Renderers
  • Cell Data Functions
  • Cell Renderers
    • Toggle Button Renderers
      • (!) ... problems
    • Pixbuf Renderers (!,f)
      • (!) ... problems
    • Spin Button Renderers (!,f)
    • Combo Box Renderers (!,f)
      • Progress Bar Renderers
    • Keyboard Accelerator Renderers
• (9) Menus and Toolbars
  • Pop-up Menus
    • Creating Pop-up Menus (!)
      • Pop-up Menu Callbacks
  • Keyboard Accelerators
  • Status Bar Hints
    • The Status Bar Widget
      • Status Bar Context and Message Identifiers
    • Menu Item Information (!)
  • Menu Items
    • Submenus
    • Image Menu Items
    • Check Menu Items
    • Radio Menu Items
  • Menu Bars
  • Tool Bars
  • Toolbar Items (!)
  • Dynamic Menu Creation
    • Creating UI Files
    • Loading UI Files
      • Additional Action Types
      • Placeholders
  • Custom Stock Items (!)
  • Test Your Understanding
• (10) Dynamic User Interfaces
  • The Glade User Interface Builder
    • Main Glade window with its menus
  • Building Example UI With Glade
    • Creating the Window
    • Adding a Toolbar
    • Completing the File Browser
    • Making Changes
    • Widget Signals
    • Creating a Menu
  • Using Libglade
  • Test Your Understanding
    • The Issues With Flexible Menu Designs
• (12) Additional GTK+ Widgets
  • Drawing Widgets (!)
  • Calendars
  • Status Icons