Difference between GtkWindow and GdkWindow?

Question

At the beginning of my Gtk-Gdk-Cairo-Pango app, I create the window:

GtkWidget   *window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);

First, there

Answer 1

Window managers (X11, Wayland, Windows's user32.dll, and the one in Mac OS X whose name I don't remember) do not (necessarily) provide much functionality on their own. What they give you is:

• the ability to create on-screen regions, called windows, which you can draw on, move around, resize, reshape, minimize, hide behind other windows, and control in other basic ways — but the most important of these for our discussion is "draw on"
• mouse event handling for windows: notifications when the mouse moves into or out of a window, around inside a window, or when the mouse buttons are clicked when the mouse cursor is over a window
• the concept of a window which receives keyboard input (the focused window) and keyboard events for this window: when the user types into a window
• miscellaneous other functions (drawing mouse cursors, for instance)

When combined with a facility to do vector graphics and text rendering into a window (which is often provided by other libraries, such as cairo and pango), the GUI toolkit comes into play. This is what takes the window manager window and divides it into all the little controls that you're familiar with: buttons, text fields, lists, tabs, web page renderers, etc.

GTK+ is the GUI toolkit in this case. It provides the plethora of controls that you use in your programs.

When you use a GUI toolkit, you don't typically interact with the window manager directly. So instead, the GUI toolkit provides its own window. When you create a GUI toolkit window, the GUI toolkit creates the underlying window manager window, then takes control of all the drawing and events so that it can handle the work of giving you all those neat controls in that window.

For GTK+, this is GtkWindow.

The designers of GTK+ did not want to have all the window manager interaction code for each individual platform that GTK+ supports in GTK+ itself. Instead, they created a separate library (included with the GTK+ source code), called GDK. GDK provides a consistent portable API around the low-level platform-specific window manager functions.

So GdkWindow is the type that wraps around a window manager window and provides the portable interface that GTK+ uses. When you create a GdkWindow, you're creating one of these low-level window manager windows, not the richer GtkWindow that you place controls on.

X11 has historically been very resource-constraining. GTK+ doesn't create a window manager window for every control; it only creates these for GtkWindow, GtkPopover, and other similar controls that act as what we as users think of as windows.

Armed with all this knowledge, you can now figure the answer to your question: you almost always want to use GtkWindow, and almost never want to use GdkWindow. GdkWindow is only really useful for the implementation of certain GTK+ controls.

And GdkWindow and GtkWindow are NOT interchangeable.

(This is a still-reasonably-accurate oversimplification of what's going on. It does not hold true for all environments. People who write native Windows programs, for instance, generally do create window manager windows for each control, and the window manager provides some basic controls, such as buttons. I may have also gotten some details in the above explanation wrong.)

The separation between GDK and GTK+ also has several other advantages. Adding Wayland support, for instance, did not (as far as I know; I could very well be wrong about this) require many changes to GTK+ itself, and there is a GDK layer called broadway which lets normal GTK+ programs render in a web browser.

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Updates, since I seem to be linking this a lot:

• There was a time when most GtkWidgets actually had their own GdkWindows; here's what happened. Now, the situation I described is the case.

Answer 2

There's so many questions in there that I'm not going to try answering all.

About latency of drawing: most likely option is that there's a bug or unoptimized code in your implementation: the draw cycle is quite unique in application code in that it really, really needs to be fast...

Things to note:

• you call gtk_widget_queue_draw(window) from your draw-event handler: that seems unnecessary
• you always redraw on a mouse event without checking if it's really necessary (possibly you do want to queue draw on all motion events: please make sure of that though)
• you always redraw the whole widget: this can be very expensive and you shouldn't do it if you only need to change a small area at a time and are doing frequent redraws like you are. See gtk_widget_queue_draw_region ().
• drawing text can be expensive: I'm not familiar with the functions you use but you may want to start with just drawing a box or something to see where the problem is