Building a GUI with GTK in C, is everything possible with the basics Widgets ? Or should I build a custom one?

Question

First, I'm totally new to GTK and would not consider myself very experienced with C.

I'm currently working on a project where I have to build a GTK GUI in C. I've started tinkering around with the GTK library, but it seems I can't find Widgets that would match the exact look of the UI I have to produce, especially while building the layout with existing Widgets.

Since I'm not very familiar with GTK, I was wondering if maybe I should build my own widget for what I would like to do? I've added an image of the render I would like to achieve:

Is it possible to achieve this look without building a custom widget?

Are there libraries that exists on top of GTK with more Widgets available that would help me with this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Almost all of what you've got there can be done with the built-in widgets, except maybe the phone icon's offset from the top of that container. You should use built-in widgets whenever possible.

What you really need is CSS styling. This will allow you to customize the look of existing widgets. You can style all of a particular type of widget, or you can add classes to individual widgets in your UI file and apply styles to those.

For example, you might want to add a notification-row class with some CSS like:

.notification-row {
  background-color: grey;
  border-radius: 6px;
}

Here's a list of available CSS properties.

To add a CSS file to your program, add it to your .gresources.xml file, then follow the instructions in the description of GtkCssProvider.