Graphical widget

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gtk3-demo, a program to demonstrate the widgets in GTK+ version 3. Gtk3-demo 3.11.8.png
gtk3-demo, a program to demonstrate the widgets in GTK+ version 3.

A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct manipulation to read or edit information about an application. User interface libraries such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Qt, GTK, and Cocoa, contain a collection of controls and the logic to render these. [1]

Contents

Each widget facilitates a specific type of user-computer interaction, and appears as a visible part of the application's GUI as defined by the theme and rendered by the rendering engine. The theme makes all widgets adhere to a unified aesthetic design and creates a sense of overall cohesion. Some widgets support interaction with the user, for example labels, buttons, and check boxes. Others act as containers that group the widgets added to them, for example windows, panels, and tabs.

Structuring a user interface with widget toolkits allows developers to reuse code for similar tasks, and provides users with a common language for interaction, maintaining consistency throughout the whole information system.

Graphical user interface builders facilitate the authoring of GUIs in a WYSIWYG manner employing a user interface markup language. They automatically generate all the source code for a widget from general descriptions provided by the developer, usually through direct manipulation.

History

Around 1920, widget entered American English, as a generic term for any useful device, particularly a product manufactured for sale; a gadget.

In 1988, the term widget is attested in the context of Project Athena and the X Window System. In An Overview of the X Toolkit by Joel McCormack and Paul Asente, it says: [2]

The toolkit provides a library of user-interface components ("widgets") like text labels, scroll bars, command buttons, and menus; enables programmers to write new widgets; and provides the glue to assemble widgets into a complete user interface.

The same year, in the manual X Toolkit Widgets - C Language X Interface by Ralph R. Swick and Terry Weissman, it says: [3]

In the X Toolkit, a widget is the combination of an X window or sub window and its associated input and output semantics.

Finally, still in the same year, Ralph R. Swick and Mark S. Ackerman explain where the term widget came from: [4]

We chose this term since all other common terms were overloaded with inappropriate connotations. We offer the observation to the skeptical, however, that the principal realization of a widget is its associated X window and the common initial letter is not un-useful.

Usage

Example of enabled and disabled widgets; the frame at the bottom is disabled, they are grayed out. GUI Frame.svg
Example of enabled and disabled widgets; the frame at the bottom is disabled, they are grayed out.

Any widget displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or a text box. The defining characteristic of a widget is to provide a single interaction point for the direct manipulation of a given kind of data. In other words, widgets are basic visual building blocks which, combined in an application, hold all the data processed by the application and the available interactions on this data.

GUI widgets are graphical elements used to build the human-machine-interface of a program. GUI widgets are implemented like software components. Widget toolkits and software frameworks, like e.g. GTK+ or Qt, contain them in software libraries so that programmers can use them to build GUIs for their programs.

A family of common reusable widgets has evolved for holding general information based on the Palo Alto Research Center Inc. research for the Xerox Alto User Interface. Various implementations of these generic widgets are often packaged together in widget toolkits, which programmers use to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Most operating systems include a set of ready-to-tailor widgets that a programmer can incorporate in an application, specifying how it is to behave. [5] Each type of widget generally is defined as a class by object-oriented programming (OOP). Therefore, many widgets are derived from class inheritance.

In the context of an application, a widget may be enabled or disabled at a given point in time. An enabled widget has the capacity to respond to events, such as keystrokes or mouse actions. A widget that cannot respond to such events is considered disabled. The appearance of a widget typically differs depending on whether it is enabled or disabled; when disabled, a widget may be drawn in a lighter color ("grayed out") or be obscured visually in some way. See the adjacent image for an example.

The benefit of disabling unavailable controls rather than hiding them entirely is that users are shown that the control exists but is currently unavailable (with the implication that changing some other control may make it available), instead of possibly leaving the user uncertain about where to find the control at all. On pop-up dialogues, buttons might appear greyed out shortly after appearance to prevent accidental clicking or inadvertent double-tapping.

Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts, e.g. virtual buttons that can be clicked with a pointer, vs. physical buttons that can be pressed with a finger (such as those on a computer mouse).

A related (but different) concept is the desktop widget, a small specialized GUI application that provides some visual information and/or easy access to frequently used functions such as clocks, calendars, news aggregators, calculators and desktop notes. These kinds of widgets are hosted by a widget engine.

List of common generic widgets

Various widgets shown in Ubuntu. Widgets.png
Various widgets shown in Ubuntu.
Qt 'widgets rendered according to three different skins (artistic design): Plastik, Keramik, and Windows Qtskins.png
Qt 'widgets rendered according to three different skins (artistic design): Plastik, Keramik, and Windows

Selection and display of collections

Text/value input

Output

Container

See also

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References

  1. "Microsoft: Graphic elements". msdn.microsoft.com. Microsoft. Retrieved 27 April 2015.
  2. McCormack, Joel; Asente, Paul (1988). "An overview of the X toolkit". Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on User Interface Software. pp. 46–55. doi:10.1145/62402.62407. ISBN   0897912837. S2CID   12924752.
  3. Swick, Ralph R.; Weissman, Terry (1988). X Toolkit Widgets - C Language X Interface. p.  1.
  4. Ralph R. Swick, Mark S. Ackerman (1988). "The X Toolkit: More Bricks for Building User-Interfaces –or– Widgets for Hire". USENIX Winter. pp. 221–228. Retrieved 2022-11-20.
  5. "What is widget? - Definition from WhatIs.com". WhatIs.com. Retrieved 2020-06-03.
  6. https://material-ui.com/demos/drawers/ Drawer React component - Material-UI