X Window System Toolkits
A toolkit in the X Window System is a piece of software that is responsible for drawing user interface elements on the screen. Such elements generally correspond to menus, drop down lists, buttons, scroll bars, and related elements.
In other graphical systems such as Windows or MacIntosh, the toolkit is directly part of the operating system. In this way, the programmer has no way to influence the look and feel of the application, other than using the existing system toolkit in innovative ways.
On the X Window System, on the other hand, programmers can decide on how these elements will be created and used. One can, for example, create a completely new toolkit to satisfy program requirements or to be used by other applications. This is exactly what the creators of Gtk+ and the Qt toolkit have done.
The flexibility of X allows different toolkits to co-exist in the same machine. Here are some of the best known toolkits currently used in UNIX and Linux applications:
- Gtk+ is the toolkit created by the developers of Gimp. It was later adopted as the official toolkit for the Gnome desktop project. In this way, Gtk+ has be adopted by thousands of applications and the standard toolkit. It provides a modern interface, similar to other commercial graphical systems such as Windows. Gtk+ is written in C, therefore it can be use from many other languages, such as Python, Perl, and scheme, among others.
- Qt is another major toolkit in use by Linux applications. It was initially developed as a closed source product by the Trolltech company. Qt was always free for developers of open source products, but it was not always open source. Over the years, Qt saw fast adoption due to its simplicity and good architecture. Nowadays, Qt is available as open source, and was adopted by the KDE developers as the standard toolkit. Qt is developed in C++, which makes it easier to use as an object oriented library. It is also available from other languages, such as Python.
- Motif was the first professional quality toolkit available on UNIX systems. It was developed to bridge the deficiencies of the X protocol to deal with end user applications. Motif provided a full set of controls such as menus, buttons, and scroll bars. A large number of commercial applications were developed for Motif due to its professional quality, compared to other options at the time. Since then, Motif has lost ground to Gtk+ and Qt and the main choice. However, it is now open source, so it is still an option, especially if one needs to further develop applications originally written for Motif.
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