GtkFixed places its child widgets at fixed positions and with
fixed sizes.
GtkFixed performs no automatic layout management.
For most applications, you should not use this container! It keeps you
from having to learn about the other GTK containers, but it results in
broken applications. With
GtkFixed, the following things will
result in truncated text, overlapping widgets, and other display bugs:
- Themes, which may change widget sizes.
- Fonts other than the one you used to write the app will of course
change the size of widgets containing text; keep in mind that users
may use a larger font because of difficulty reading the default, or
they may be using a different OS that provides different fonts.
- Translation of text into other languages changes its size. Also,
display of non-English text will use a different font in many
cases.
In addition,
GtkFixed does not pay attention to text
direction and thus may produce unwanted results if your app is run
under right-to-left languages such as Hebrew or Arabic. That is:
normally GTK will order containers appropriately for the text
direction, e.g. to put labels to the right of the thing they label
when using an RTL language, but it can’t do that with
GtkFixed. So if you need to reorder widgets depending on the
text direction, you would need to manually detect it and adjust child
positions accordingly.
Finally, fixed positioning makes it kind of annoying to add/remove UI
elements, since you have to reposition all the other elements. This is
a long-term maintenance problem for your application.
If you know none of these things are an issue for your application,
and prefer the simplicity of
GtkFixed, by all means use the
widget. But you should be aware of the tradeoffs.