Wow PKGget window resizable

I say "wow" because this has been requested so many times over the years. The PKGget GUI is implemented with gtkdialog, and I was never able to understand it well enough to figure out how to drag the side of the window to enarge the space, with the widgets inside automatically expanding to fill the window.

I posted about this next-generation PKGget earlier today:

• PKGget now syncs with APT — July 01, 2025

The main problem was the fixed size of the box that displays package names and their descriptions. Also, the divide between the two was fixed. Firstly, here is the window at its default minimal size:

...note, that "APT tools" doesn't yet do anything. I am proposing it for the future, for various APT management related operations.

The divide between "Package" and "Description" is now draggable:

There's more goodness; the side of the window can be dragged:

...fantastic!

I still don't understand fully how gtkdialog packs the widgets; messing around, just stumbled upon something that works. What I have not been able to do is drag the bottom window to enlarge the height of the "Installed packages" section.

The guy who really knows about gtkdialog is forum member zigbert. He is not very active on the forum these days, but still posts sometimes. He is the author of Pmusic and Pburn; the latter is in EasyOS. Zigbert maintained this gtkdialog how-to thread in the old Puppy Forum:

https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=38608

Mick, 01micko on the forum is another guy who has taken a back seat in recent years. He created some official releases of Puppy a few years ago ...I just checked, the last one was "Slacko" Puppy 7.0 released January 2021. He is still active, low key, in a few areas, such as this port of gtkdialog to gtk3:

https://github.com/01micko/gtk3dialog

...haven't tried it, still running a much older gtk2 variant in EasyOS.

There are a few guys active with gtkdialog, MochiMoppel comes to mind. There is discussion here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=7820

There is also some discussion about the death of gtkdialog, due to the move to Wayland, and the likelihood of gtkdialog not advancing beyond gtk3:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=14443

...at least in EasyOS, gtkdialog will live on.

This page has links to gtkdialog documentation:

https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=9274

Maybe after the next EasyOS is uploaded, someone can study the docs and figure out how to drag the height of the window.   

Tags: easy