Applying GTK3 CSS to gvim

Issue

I have compiled and installed gvim 8.0.16 from source, with gtk3 support, under CentOS 7. I can set some style in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk-css, e.g. this sets the background of the widgets above the edit window:

@define-color bg_color #ffd4a1;
* {
    background-color: @bg_color;
}

Works nicely. However, there are some more appearance snags I want to tune, like having a 1px border around the popup menus and I can't find a rule to place my border: 1px solid black; in because I can't seem to get the whole application's widget tree.

Now in the olden days of X11 I would ask editres(1) and get the complete widget tree.

But GTK programs don't speak the editres protocol. Instead, the equivalent appears to be the GTK+ Inspector. I can run gvim under the inspector with GTK_DEBUG=interactive gvim. However, I'm too dense to get any useful hierarchy information from it. Under the "Objects" tab it only ever shows a single line "GtkSettings 0x219cb50". If I select the cross-hair and pick a gvim widget, nothing happens, AFAICS. I would have expected the GtkApplication top level widget to be somewhere to explore. What am I missing?

Solution

I've tried this again, after more than 5 years with gvim 8.2.4485 and now there's a navigatable widget tree in the "Objects" tab.

It would appear this was a bug in either gvim or the GTK3 lib that has since been addressed.

Answered By - Jens