For most applications, you should not use this container! It keeps
you from having to learn about the other GTK containers, but it
results in broken applications. With gtk.fixed.Fixed, the following
things will result in truncated text, overlapping widgets, and
other display bugs:
Themes, which may change widget sizes.
Fonts other than the one you used to write the app will of course
change the size of widgets containing text; keep in mind that
users may use a larger font because of difficulty reading the
default, or they may be using a different OS that provides different fonts.
Translation of text into other languages changes its size. Also,
display of non-English text will use a different font in many
cases.
In addition, gtk.fixed.Fixed does not pay attention to text direction and
thus may produce unwanted results if your app is run under right-to-left
languages such as Hebrew or Arabic. That is: normally GTK will order
containers appropriately for the text direction, e.g. to put labels to
the right of the thing they label when using an RTL language, but it can’t
do that with gtk.fixed.Fixed. So if you need to reorder widgets depending on
the text direction, you would need to manually detect it and adjust child
positions accordingly.
Finally, fixed positioning makes it kind of annoying to add/remove
UI elements, since you have to reposition all the other elements. This
is a long-term maintenance problem for your application.
If you know none of these things are an issue for your application,
and prefer the simplicity of gtk.fixed.Fixed, by all means use the
widget. But you should be aware of the tradeoffs.
gtk.fixed.Fixed places its child widgets at fixed positions and with fixed sizes.
gtk.fixed.Fixed performs no automatic layout management.
For most applications, you should not use this container! It keeps you from having to learn about the other GTK containers, but it results in broken applications. With gtk.fixed.Fixed, the following things will result in truncated text, overlapping widgets, and other display bugs:
In addition, gtk.fixed.Fixed does not pay attention to text direction and thus may produce unwanted results if your app is run under right-to-left languages such as Hebrew or Arabic. That is: normally GTK will order containers appropriately for the text direction, e.g. to put labels to the right of the thing they label when using an RTL language, but it can’t do that with gtk.fixed.Fixed. So if you need to reorder widgets depending on the text direction, you would need to manually detect it and adjust child positions accordingly.
Finally, fixed positioning makes it kind of annoying to add/remove UI elements, since you have to reposition all the other elements. This is a long-term maintenance problem for your application.
If you know none of these things are an issue for your application, and prefer the simplicity of gtk.fixed.Fixed, by all means use the widget. But you should be aware of the tradeoffs.