X Toolkit Intrinsics (also known as Xt, for X toolkit) is a library that implements an API to facilitate the development of programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) for the X Window System. It can be used in the C language (or any language that can use the C API, such as C++). Design took place late 1980s to early 1990s.[citation needed]
Xt (mint-green) in the X Window System graphics stack
The low-level library Xlib is the client-side implementation of the X11 protocol. It communicates with an X server, but does not provide any function for implementing graphical control elements ("widgets"), such as buttons or menus. The Xt library provides support for creating widget types, but does not provide any itself. A programmer could use the Xt library to create and use a new type of widget. Xt implemented some object oriented concepts, such as inheritance (the user could make their own button by reusing code written for another type of button), events, and callbacks.
Since the graphical user interface of applications typically requires a number of widget types, most developers were reluctant to write their own, and instead prefer to use libraries such as Xaw, Motif and OLIT that provide a set of widgets.
Xt programs had a notorious problem of being unusable if the "app-defaults Xrm database", a text file describing all the widgets, could not be found.[citation needed] Most modern, widely-used toolkits such as GTK and Qt do not use the Xt library. Rather, they use Xlib or XCB directly.
Nye, Adrian; O'Reilly, Tim (1990). X Toolkit Intrinsics Programming Manual. The Definitive Guides to the X Window System. Vol.4. O'Reilly Media. ISBN978-1-56592-003-3.[discuss]
O'Reilly, Tim; Langley, Mark (1990). X Toolkit Intrinsics Reference Manual. The Definitive Guides to the X Window System. Vol.5. O'Reilly Media. ISBN978-0-937175-35-4.[discuss]
NeWS is a discontinued windowing system developed by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1980s. Originally known as "SunDew", its primary authors were James Gosling and David S. H. Rosenthal. The NeWS interpreter was based on PostScript extending it to allow interaction and multiple "contexts" to support windows. Like PostScript, NeWS could be used as a complete programming language, but unlike PostScript, NeWS could be used to make complete interactive programs with mouse support and a GUI.
GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.
In computing, a windowing system is a software suite that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP paradigm for a user interface.
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In computing, the X Window System is a network-transparent windowing system for bitmap displays. This article details the protocols and technical structure of X11.
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The X Window System core protocol is the base protocol of the X Window System, which is a networked windowing system for bitmap displays used to build graphical user interfaces on Unix, Unix-like, and other operating systems. The X Window System is based on a client–server model: a single server controls the input/output hardware, such as the screen, the keyboard, and the mouse; all application programs act as clients, interacting with the user and with the other clients via the server. This interaction is regulated by the X Window System core protocol. Other protocols related to the X Window System exist, both built at the top of the X Window System core protocol or as separate protocols.
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