Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

4 Overview of the Motif Toolkit

This chapter helps the reader understand the components of a real Motif application. It discusses how to handle the

geometry management of primitive widgets within a manager widget, when to put components into the main window,

when to use dialog boxes and menus, and how to relate to the window manager. After reading this chapter, the

programmer should have a solid overview of Motif application programming, and she should be able to read the

remaining chapters in any order.

In Chapter 2, The Motif Programming Model, we talked about the basic structure of an Xt−based program. We

described how to initialize the toolkit, create and configure widgets, link them to the application, and turn control over

to Xt's main loop. In this chapter, we discuss the widgets in the Motif toolkit and how you can put them together to

create an effective user interface for an application.

If you already have a basic understanding of the Motif widgets, you can jump ahead to any of the later chapters in the

book that focus on individual widget classes. This chapter provides some insight into the design of the widgets and a

general overview of the Motif style and methodology, which you may find useful when developing your own

applications.

This chapter also describes all of the new features in Release 1.2 of Motif. If you are familiar with Motif 1.1 but need

to get up to speed with Motif 1.2, you should read Section #smotif12. In this section, we summarize the new features

and tell you ...