Why Are Modern X11 Tookits Not Written For Xt?

Vinodh D Rajan asks: "Being fed up with the disparate look and feel among the Linux toolkits and incompatibilities between them, I recently started studying the user interfaces available under Linux, something I called The Unified Linux Desktop. For this I started studying how GTK+, QT, FLTK, GNUstep, Motif, Xaw, etc all work. The more I studied them, the more I wondered as to why modern tookits are not written against the Xt standard, since it is the one that has been standardized. Since Motif has been so successful, why not spend effort trying to improve it and provide a common framework for component development, instead writing incompatible toolkits?"

"I am sure that any inadequacies in Xt can be improved. Projects like neXtaw dramatically improves Xaw look and feel. Why not just develop the standards instead of developing newer stuff that is incompatible with standards. Besides the way GTK+'s object system works, seems almost similar to Xt's object system. Apart from cross platform development concerns, what made GTK+ developers write their own subsystem instead of using Xt."

Comments

Re:Documentation

[Tet]

Futhermore, this documentation and the man pages for the Xlib/Xt API are NOT very good.

Just to play devil's advocate for a second:

leto:~% man gtk_window_new
No manual entry for gtk_window_new

At least Xt *has* man pages. Sure, there's plenty of HTML documentation for gtk+, but when you're in the middle of a coding session and you can't remember the arguments to a function, suspending and reading the man page is a lot less hassle than firing up a web browser and navigating to the right page. Qt used to have the same problem, but I believe there are now man pages for Qt classes and member functions.

The main problem with Xt, though, is not the documentation. It's the fact that it's not sufficiently abstracted. You can't sit down and write a standalone Xt app that does anything meaningful. You need to know raw Xlib as well in order to do the things that Xt can't. When you add Motif into the equation, things get even worse. You need to know all three. Looking at the X books on my shelf, that's several thousand pages of documentation that you need to know about before you can write anything useful. Both gtk+ and qt let you write an application without having to know about the underlying Xlib layer. If you've ever had to do any Motif or Xt programming, you'd know just how big a benefit that is. I'm just glad I don't have to do it any more...

Motif is simply unapproachable for the beginner

[ikekrull]

I dabble with C, Java, Perl and other languages.

I am a 'child of the internet' when it comes to programming - i.e everything i know about computers and programming i either learnt from the net, or from books I bought because i wanted to expand the knowldege i gained from the net.

If i had gone to university, maybe i would have been exposed to Motif, but since its a Windows world out there for most of the youth today, theyre going to look for something more immediately similar to the Win32 API.

When i look around the net for information, there just isn't anything obviously useful for Motif - You can get so much more done, so much faster, if you use the amazing open-source technologies like GTK+, GNOME, Qt, SDL etc.

Since Motif has been opened, we might see more, but from my point of view, Motif is a dead horse (an ugly dead horse at that), which i simply see no need to bother with. If you have a huge, existing application that uses Motif, then you probably want to persist with it, but if youre starting fresh, why would you use Motif?

The question really should be 'What does OpenMotif bring to the table for the open source developer compared to the existing standards like GTK+ and Qt?'