SDL3 Introduces The Concept Of Child Popup Windows

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 12 March 2023 at 07:03 AM EDT. Add A Comment
LINUX GAMING
Development work on SDL3 continues at full-speed for the next version of this hardware/software abstraction library that is commonly used by cross-platform games. The newest feature merged is support for child pop-up windows.

This week a commit landed for SDL3 introducing the child pop-up window concept, which in this context is described as:
Add the CreatePopupWindow function to allow the creation of child tooltip and menu popup windows. Popup windows must be created as either a tooltip or popup menu and cannot be minimized, maximized, made fullscreen, or grab the mouse.

Child popup windows are tracked and will be recursively hidden, shown, or destroyed in tandem with the parent window.

This pop-up window support was in turn wired up across the Wayland, X11, video, Cocoa, and Win32 back-ends.

The effort stems from this feature request to support cross-platform tooltips within SDL applications. Existing SDL2 tooltip functionality only worked on X11 and Wayland - more details via this pull for interested game/app developers.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week