I am learning to use GTK+ in C, and as I am making more complex examples a few things are starting to bother me:

The lines of code are VERY long!

There is a huge amount of widgets. How do I name them uniquely in a way that makes sense with the hierarchy of containers without having 30 character long varaibles?

It is best practice for all widgets to have a unique name, or is it a good idea to have some temporary widget variable?

For as much as I know I don't understand how you can manage a small settings dialog, let alone a full GUI app!

I don't deal with GTK very much but in my experience with Qt you'd break individual widgets into their own classes and use pointers to handle the too many variables problem.

Regards,

Alunduil

C is not an object-oriented language.

Look up gtkmm.

And/or code in Perl which allows to have anonymous subroutines and closures.

The idea of using a class as mentioned by alunduil is still valid in C. Just think struct rather than class, and remember it's just a container for that dialog. That way you will have a struct for, say a printing dialog box and you can call you cancel button cancel, or btnCancel if you prefer. You can also create a find dialog box again create a struct and the cancel button can be given the same variable name.

But don't I still have to include the name of the struct when I want to access the widget?

Yes. But C99 has lexical scoping, so names should be unique only in the scope.

That's the price you pay to make the code maintainable.

To help make the code more readable you can always break your lines up and aligning each variable beneath each other, this is often necessary when passing several widgets to a function. You can then choose an alignment style that suits you aesthetic needs.

Not certain what such liberal usage of whitespace Python would make of that approach, probably awaken the Knights who say Ni from within the interpreter.