[pygtk] How to size a TextView? Any suggestions?

[Charles D Hixson]

I'm trying to place a textview into a scrolled window (inside of either
an HBox or a Table), and running into the problem that the window is
unreasonably narrow.  Even if I attach it into a Table and tell the
table.attach(sw, 1, 6, 0, 4) while the pane is sufficiently wide, the
text entered in that pane is about 8-10 characters wide...then it will
wrap, or disappear off the edge.  And if one looks below, one notices
that the horizontal scrollbar is only as wide as the text...so the
scrolled window seems to be the culprit.

Strangely enough, if I build this in Glade, and specify width to make
the panel wide enough, then when I compile it the first column (a button
bar) is hidden...presumably beneath the scrolled window.  This was just
a test, so there wasn't any data in it to check for wrapping.  (I
planned to look at the C code to figure out what to tell pyGtk, but it
was worse than the tests from python.)  Gazpatcheo appears to generate a
reasonable file, but the Glade file looks good from within Glade, also. 
Besides, that file uses an attribute, thus: <property
name="width_request">344</property>, and none of the documentation I've
encountered defines what that would do.

I'd include the code, but it's a bit verbose for a mailing list for even
a simple case.  Also, I've tried several different things, and detailing
that....