Fixed is a Container Widget that allows you to position other widgets on it
at fixed coordinates. These could include Buttons and Labels as well as
more complex composite widgets like Boxes.
You should not use Fixed for any non-trivial purpose. While you might think
at first that it would simplify your application, the reality is that Fixed
is almost always the wrong Container choice. Because GTK is the widget
toolkit used to power the user interfaces of GNOME applications, the
appearance of Widgets is very dynamic. Different window managers and theme
engines can radically change the size and appearance of Widgets to suit
varying accessibility and usability requirements; different fonts available
to your users will cause Labels to be sized differently than you'd expect,
and of course translation completely throws predictability right out the
window. Since the Fixed Container does
not adapt to the size
requests of the Widgets with in it, the frequent result is truncated text,
overlapping Widgets, and other visual bugs.
The Fixed widget can't be properly mirrored in right-to-left languages such
as Hebrew and Arabic. A Fixed widget with a right-to-left font will render
your application unusable.
Adding or removing any GUI elements from this Fixed requires you to
reposition all the other Widgets within it. As you can imagine, this will
end up a long-term maintenance headache for your application.
If any of those are a concern for your application, then you should be
using a different Container, either combinations of
VBox
and
HBox
, or perhaps
Table
. You have been warned!