Information AboutGtk+ |
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name = GTK+
Initially created for the raster graphics editor, the GNU Image Manipulation Program , the GIMP Toolkit—abbreviated, and almost exclusively known, as '''GTK+'''—is one of the two most popular Widget Toolkit s for the X Window System for creating Graphical User Interface s. GTK+ and Qt have supplanted Motif , previously the most widely-used X widget toolkit. GTK+ was originally created in 1997 by Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Josh MacDonald - all of whom were members of EXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) at UC Berkeley . Licensed under the LGPL , GTK+ is Free (and Open Source ) Software , and is part of the GNU Project . PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES GTK+ uses the C Programming Language , although its designers use an Object-oriented paradigm. The GNOME platform bindings provide for C++ ( Gtkmm ), Perl , Ruby , Java and Python ( PyGTK ) bindings; others have written bindings for many other Programming Language s (including Ada , D , Haskell , Pascal , PHP , and all .NET programming languages). Unlike many other widget toolkits, but like Qt , GTK+ isn't based on Xt . The advantage of this is that it allows GTK+ to be available on other systems and to be much more flexible. The disadvantage is that it doesn't have access to the X resource database, which is the traditional way for customizing X11 applications. LOOK AND FEEL The end-user can configure the look of the toolkit, down to offering a number of different display ''engines''. Engines exist which emulate the look of other popular toolkits or platforms, like Windows 95 , Motif , Qt or NEXTSTEP . ENVIRONMENTS THAT USE GTK+ 2.0 on Xfce4 ]]
Not only these Desktop Environment s use it, though. Any GTK+ program can run on top of other environments, such as KDE . GTK+ can also run under Microsoft Windows . Some of the more unusual ports include DirectFB and Ncurses . WINDOW MANAGERS NON-GRAPHICS-RELATED CODE GTK+ initially contained some utility routines that did not strictly relate to graphics, for instance providing such Data Structures as linked lists and Binary Tree s. Such general utilities, along with the object system called GObject , have now migrated into a separate library, Glib , which programmers use regularly to develop code that does not require a graphical interface. GTK+ 2 GTK+ 2 has succeeded GTK+. Its new features include improved text rendering using Pango , a new theme engine, improved accessibility using Accessibility Toolkit , complete transition to Unicode using UTF-8 strings and a more flexible API. However, GTK+ 2 lacks compatibility with GTK+ 1, and programmers must port applications to it. Some programs continue to use GTK+ 1, as the original version remains in use, is faster, is less complex than GTK+ 2, and is more suitable for embedded applications than GTK+ 2. Starting with version 2.8 GTK+ 2 relies on the Cairo library for rendering with vector-graphics in GTK+ 2. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
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