When creating an application, you'll want to put more than one widget
inside a window. Our first helloworld example only used one
widget so we could simply use a gtk_container_add call to "pack" the
widget into the window. But when you want to put more than one widget
into a window, how do you control where that widget is positioned?
This is where packing comes in.
Most packing is done by creating boxes. These
are invisible widget containers that we can pack our widgets into
which come in two forms, a horizontal box, and a vertical box. When
packing widgets into a horizontal box, the objects are inserted
horizontally from left to right or right to left depending on the call
used. In a vertical box, widgets are packed from top to bottom or vice
versa. You may use any combination of boxes inside or beside other
boxes to create the desired effect.
To create a new horizontal box, we use a call to gtk_hbox_new(), and
for vertical boxes, gtk_vbox_new(). The gtk_box_pack_start() and
gtk_box_pack_end() functions are used to place objects inside of these
containers. The gtk_box_pack_start() function will start at the top
and work its way down in a vbox, and pack left to right in an hbox.
gtk_box_pack_end() will do the opposite, packing from bottom to top in
a vbox, and right to left in an hbox. Using these functions allows us
to right justify or left justify our widgets and may be mixed in any
way to achieve the desired effect. We will use gtk_box_pack_start() in
most of our examples. An object may be another container or a
widget. In fact, many widgets are actually containers themselves,
including the button, but we usually only use a label inside a button.
By using these calls, GTK knows where you want to place your widgets
so it can do automatic resizing and other nifty things. There are also
a number of options as to how your widgets should be packed. As you
can imagine, this method gives us a quite a bit of flexibility when
placing and creating widgets.
