Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

26 Building an Application With UIL

This chapter draws on many of the features of UIL in developing a fully functional text editor application. It shows

how the various components of UIL and Mrm come together in a real application.

In this chapter, we examine a real application that uses UIL. Although we have shown you a simple application and a

number of UIL modules in the preceding chapters, we have not put everything together yet. This chapter provides

some examples of common uses of UIL in an application, including the definition of a menu system and some dialogs.

Rather than start from scratch, we are going to use the simple text editor application from Chapter 14, Text Widgets.

This program reads and writes text files, provides the usual cut, copy, and paste operations on the Edit menu, and

performs search and replace operations from the Search menu. The interface of the editor program appears in the

figure.

The editor_uil application

The UIL version of the text editor differs from the non−UIL version in several ways. The most obvious change is that

the user interface must be described in UIL, instead of C. The program code also needs to be modified to create the

interface with Mrm. The application callbacks need to be connected to procedures in UIL, and some global variables

need to be initialized when widgets are created. We have also enhanced the program so that it distinguishes between ...