Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

the current one, change_color() returns, as there is no point in reloading an identical pixmap. For additional

information about loading and using colors, see Volume One, Xlib Programming Manual, and Volume Two, Xlib

Reference Manual.

The help_cb() function is the callback routine for the Help menu item on the Help menu. It simply displays an

InformationDialog that contains a message describing how to use the program. See Chapter 5, Introduction to

Dialogs, and Chapter 21, Advanced Dialog Programming, for a complete description of these dialogs and

suggestions on implementing a functional help system.

5.3 The Command and Message Areas

We have already covered most of what you need to know about the MainWindow of an application in this chapter and

Chapter 3, Overview of the Motif Toolkit. The material in the rest of the chapter is considered somewhat advanced, so

you could skip the remaining sections and be relatively secure in moving on to the next chapter. The remaining

material provides details about the MainWindow widget that need to be discussed in order to make this chapter

complete.

The greatest difficulty with the command and message areas of the MainWindow is that these objects are better

defined in the Motif specification than in the Motif toolkit. The command area is intended to support a tty−style

command−line interface to an application. The command area is not supposed to act like xterm or any sort of terminal

emulator; it is just a single−line text area for entering individually ...