Question

I’m trying to write a kiosk GUI in ruby/gtk on ubuntu. I’m pretty fluent in ruby, but new to writing GUIs and not great with linux.

I’m using a touch screen, and am using our own images for buttons, e.g.

button_image = Gtk::Image.new(Gdk::Pixbuff.new "images/button_image.png")
@button = Gtk::Button.new 
@button.add(button_image)
@button.set_relief(Gtk::RELIEF_NONE)

My issue is that when the buttons are pressed or remain selected (or hovered over, although this is less relevant with a touch screen), gtk shows fat, square borders around them. Obviously it’s applying gtk’s prelight / selected / active lighting to the buttons. I’ve tried changing the button properties in various ways, and also tryied hacking apart my theme, and while I can modify how the highlighting looks, I can’t seem to completely get rid of it. Changing the color of the highlight via my theme is easy, but if I remove my setting there’s still a default I can’t get rid of.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to stop it, or possibly make it transparent? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I tried meddling with the drawing as Federico suggested, but found that the most direct way to address this was instead to use an event box rather than a button. Event boxes accept clicks just like buttons, but don’t respond to selecting, hovering, etc. In ruby, the code looks like this:

image = Gtk::Image.new("myfile.png")
event_box = Gtk::EventBox.new.add(image)
event_box.visible_window = false
event_box.signal_connect("button_press_event") do
  puts "Clicked."
end

Most of this is exactly like a button; the *visible_window* method, obviously, keeps the event box from being visible under the button image.