Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

9.5 The RowColumn Widget

The RowColumn widget is a manager widget that, as its name implies, lays out its children in a row and/or column

format. The widget is also used internally by the Motif toolkit to implement a number of special objects, such as the

Motif menus, including PopupMenus, PulldownMenus, MenuBars, and OptionMenus. Many of the resources for the

RowColumn widget are used to control different aspects of these objects. The Motif convenience functions for

creating these objects set most of these resources automatically, so they are generally hidden from the programmer.

The resources are not useful when you are using the RowColumn as a simple manager widget anyway, so we do not

discuss them here.

The XmNrowColumnType resource controls how a particular instance of the RowColumn is used. The resource can

be set to the following values:

XmWORK_AREA

XmMENU_BAR

XmPULLDOWN

XmMENU_POPUP

XmMENU_OPTION

The default value is XmWORK_AREA; this value is also the one that you should use whenever you want to use a

RowColumn widget as a manager. The rest of the values are for the different types of Motif menus. If you want to

create a particular menu object, you should use the appropriate convenience function, rather than try to create the

menu yourself using a RowColumn directly. We discuss menu creation in in Chapter 4, The Main Window, and

Chapter 15, Menus. The RowColumn widget is also used to implement RadioBoxes and CheckBoxes, which are

collections of ToggleButtons. See Chapter 11, Labels ...