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by kayamon 3598 days ago
Heh, yeah the context menu on the scroll bars is my go-to tell to discover whether it's a real scroll bar widget or an imitation one. (Gotta write an article on that too one day)
1 comments

Yeah, I like that too. Makes you think twice about re-implementing widgets because of the insane amount of functionality that is tied even to the simplest widgets and still invisible.

Think of how hard it would be to re-implement a dropdown, for instance: You would need to implement keyboard navigation (arrow keys), jump-to-entry (using the letter-keys), srolling with the mouse wheel, flipping through entries while the dropdown menu is closed and probably a thousand other things that I never used but some people do.

I did do this back in the VB5 days and it was a proper pain. From memory I couldn't get the listbox window to draw outside of it's hosting window (needed for controls at the bottom of a window) and allow moving of the hosting window at the same time.

In the end I think I cheated and drew the list box on the parent with an option to go up or down depending on it's relative position.

Certainly was complicated.

Not really a cheat. Context menus already do that. Try opening a context menu near the bottom of your browser window.
Now imagine a "combobox".