Re: [gtk-list] Re: To GTK, or not to GTK - that is the question

[Chris Bitmead misys com au]

>Having lots of widget sets is good - it promotes competition.  In the
>short term you have a mixture of sets present on your desktop as the
>applications you want to run are written using different sets.  As
>time passes, one of the good widget sets reaches critical mindshare
>mass and emerges as the defacto standard.  This is called innovation.

Well, yeah, except I thought the X11 world had been through that childhood
already. We went through xview, OLIT and Motif, and I was kinda hoping
things had settled down.

There are two issues though, the "look" and the infrastructure. Motif as
a look seems to have survived. Gtk and Tcl/Tk seem to have adopted the
general look. The widget set used to achieve that look, there are too
many of. I can think of 4 widget sets which implement a Motif look. I
think that's a pity. It affects the user too, because the user can't
set some Xdefaults to get all their apps looking the same. Depending on
how the app was written and which widget set, each has a different method.


>I programmed applications with Motif for a number of years.  I hated
>it, although Wcl made things a little easier to stomach.

I wish I understood the dislike for Motif programming. My experience has
been pretty positive.

>The biggest difference between Motif and Gtk is that the Gtk people
developed the
>widget set for a real application.  This means that the widget set is
>very functional, and easy to program.  One the other hand, OSF seems
>to have developed their widget set without trying to build anything
>more complex than a data entry system.


So the OSF widget set does not provide ..... ??