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Martino Ferrari 8073e7b3fd feat: the main window's skeleton is a UI file

src/ui/main-window.ui holds the window, its two panes, the plot column with the status line under it,
and the sidebar's scroller. What stays in code is what depends on the stream: the events pane, the two
plot areas, the sidebar's panels and the status popover, each put into a slot by id.

The header bar is deliberately not in the file. It is the window's own titlebar, every button on it is
wired to an action, and an AdwApplicationWindow refuses a titlebar outright -- a fatal Adwaita-ERROR
rather than a warning that leaves the window merely ugly -- so the window is a GtkApplicationWindow and
the header bar stays where it was.

gtk_paned_set_position() is the other thing that had to stay in code, and the reason is order rather
than shape: it clamps against its children *now*, so stating it before the sidebar's panels exist moved
the plot column by ~180 px.

The layout, events and box-zoom probes read what they read before this change, and the header reads
window_button_w=130 bar_w=756 as it always has -- checked by building the previous commit and running
the same probe against it, because the layout numbers in the notes turned out to be stale from an
earlier session. Five UI files now.

2026-10-11 17:39:04 +02:00

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UI files and current GTK practice

Where the application's interface should be a .ui resource instead of widget construction, what is already there, and the order to finish it in. Written 2026-10-11.

Why

Three reasons, in the order they bite.

Some things can only be said in a UI file. The shortcut overview is the proof: GTK's GtkShortcutsShortcut has exactly one gesture type that draws an icon, and libadwaita's AdwShortcutsItem has no icon property at all -- so a mouse gesture can only be shown as a glyph from a .ui. src/ui/shortcuts.ui is that, and it is the reason the file exists.
Structure is data. A window's arrangement rewritten in C++ is a hundred lines of gtk_box_append that no one can read at a glance, cannot be compared with a diff, and cannot be previewed. A UI file is the same arrangement in the notation the GNOME ecosystem reads.
Current GTK and libadwaita have better widgets than this app uses. The forms here are GtkEntry/GtkSpinButton in hand-built label rows. The modern equivalents -- AdwEntryRow, AdwSpinRow, AdwSwitchRow, AdwComboRow, inside AdwPreferencesPage/AdwPreferencesGroup in an AdwPreferencesDialog -- are what the preferences dialog should be, and they come from the same move.

Conventions (established, and in `docs/claude/invariants-gtk-and-chrome.md`)

.ui files live in src/ui/ and are compiled by the third GResource (udpscope-ui.gresource.xml, prefix=/org/udpscope/ui), loaded with gtk_builder_new_from_resource().
Every file carries preprocess="xml-stripblanks", which is the only thing that catches a malformed file at build time.
A file that is valid XML but wrong for GTK aborts the process (Gtk-ERROR). The probe that opens every window is what catches that; there is no build-time substitute.
A GIcon property takes a nested object, not a name.
A .ui over 4095 characters needs -Wno-overlength-strings on its generated source.
A window built from a builder is replaced (not reused) on the next opening: it belongs to the builder's object list, and a destroyed GtkWindow cannot be presented again.
A deprecated widget is acceptable when no deprecated function is called.

Acceptance for every slice

The same as any other change here: the build stays at four warnings, a run stays at no Gtk-CRITICAL, and the slice's own surface is read back by a probe rather than asserted. A new .ui needs a probe that proves it loads and that its contents match whatever drives it -- [help]'s ui= against tables= is the model.

Already done

src/ui/main-window.ui -- the main window's skeleton: the window, its two panes, the plot column with the status line under it, and the sidebar's scroller. The four subtrees that depend on the stream (the events pane, the two plot areas, the sidebar's panels, the status popover) are still built by code and put into the slots by id.
src/ui/source-form.ui -- the form a source is added or edited with: an AdwDialog of AdwPreferencesGroup rows, with its action in the header bar where the label says which mode it is in.
src/ui/help.ui -- the help window's chrome: an AdwWindow with a header bar and an AdwNavigationSplitView whose sidebar is the page list. The rows stay in C++ because the fourteen pages are data, not template.
src/ui/preferences.ui -- the preferences, as an AdwPreferencesDialog with AdwEntryRow, AdwSpinRow, AdwSwitchRow, AdwComboRow and AdwButtonRow rows. The Apply button is gone: a row applies as it changes, which is what those widgets are designed around, and [prefs-probe] reads the file back after every change.
src/ui/shortcuts.ui -- the shortcut overview, with the mouse rows drawn as an icon cell.
The src/ui/ GResource and its build block.
[help]'s ui=/ui_accel=/ui_icon=/ui_bare= reading, which checks the file against the tables and asserts that no row is left without a visual.

Remaining, smallest first

where	what	why it is the right next step
`src/source_dialog.cpp` (the chooser's own window)	the chooser: `.ui` for the window, its two pages and its action row. Its host form is done; what is left is the list, the notebook and the buttons around it	the last hand-built UI outside `ui.cpp`, and the file is already open
`src/ui.cpp` (the panels inside the skeleton)	the trigger panel, the signal panel, the cursors/measurements/math panels, the layout editor's overlay, the menus and the popovers: `.ui` for each, in that order, with the probe that reads it run after each	each is self-contained inside the skeleton that is now in place, and each has a probe of its own

Nothing in this list should be done in one pass. Each row is its own change, verified on its own.

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