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.
A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of programs.
OPEN LOOK is a graphical user interface (GUI) specification for UNIX workstations. It was originally defined in the late 1980s by Sun Microsystems and AT&T Corporation.
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Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) is a cross-platform widget library for graphical user interfaces (GUIs), developed by Bill Spitzak and others. Made to accommodate 3D graphics programming, it has an interface to OpenGL, but it is also suitable for general GUI programming.
A graphical widget 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.
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.
XView is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988. It provides an OPEN LOOK user interface for X Window System applications, with an object-oriented application programming interface (API) for the C programming language. Its interface, controls, and layouts are very close to that of the earlier SunView window system, making it easy to convert existing applications from SunView to X. Sun also produced the User Interface Toolkit (UIT), a C++ API to XView.
Xlib is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the X protocol.
X Athena Widgets or Xaw is a GUI widget library for the X Window System. Developed as part of Project Athena, Xaw was written under the auspices of the MIT X Consortium as a sample widget set built on X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt); Xt and Xaw are collectively known as the X Toolkit. Xaw has been largely superseded by more sophisticated toolkits like Motif, and later toolkits such as GTK, and Qt, but it is still maintained and is available as part of most X Window System installations. The library, like other core parts of X, is licensed under the MIT License.
In computer science, the event loop is a programming construct or design pattern that waits for and dispatches events or messages in a program. The event loop works by making a request to some internal or external "event provider", then calls the relevant event handler. The event loop is also sometimes referred to as the message dispatcher, message loop, message pump, or run loop.
A PIGUI package is a software library that a programmer uses to produce GUI code for multiple computer platforms. The package presents subroutines and/or objects which are independent of the GUIs that the programmer is targeting. For software to qualify as PIGUI it must support several GUIs under at least two different operating systems. The package does not necessarily provide any additional portability features. Native look and feel is a desirable feature, but is not essential for PIGUIs.
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