[Raion]

I've been studying a lot about IRIX's native toolkit, Motif, and the related Viewkit. I am thus going to be getting all of these resources in one place, in hopes it saves someone else some time:

Documentation

Try these resources: 

https://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~rth/cs/cs177/s9...oUIL2.html

http://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave.Marshall/X_lecture/

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/motif/vol6a/Vol6a.pdf

GUI Design

If you don't want to manually have to code your GUI, you have two options:

1. RapidApp (will be on the FTP soonish, I keep forgetting to put it up)
2. EasyMotif: https://sourceforge.net/projects/easymotif

Both focus on the GUI widgets and aspects.

Bindings

Motif is a C-based toolkit. So it doesn't have C++ bindings.

The original Motif: https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/

ViewKlass, a Viewkit implementation: http://viewklass.sourceforge.net/todo.html

Viewkit, the original is included with IRIX: https://techpubs.jurassic.nl/manuals/065...index.html 

Notes

Motif predates much of the standardization of Unicode, UTF-8, internationalization support, and especially things like C++11, C11 etc. This may or may not impact how you program it, and it's still certainly possible to write a unicode-aware application in it. There's just not much in the way of standardization.

Motif documentation is more "paper" than "web". There may be other things I could add to this, certainly don't hesitate to let me know.

[dpr]

I used to do a lot of Motif programming for work. I haven't touched it in at least 15 years. I was always fond of the layout management, but it's, regrettably, quite obsolete now. Unless you're doing maintenance on government or military systems I wouldn't bother with it.

Still, I wanted to mention Kenton Lee's Motif FAQ: http://www.rahul.net/kenton/mfaq.html

It was an invaluable resource to me back in the day. Somewhere in there is the answer to pretty much anything you can think of.

[Raion]

Absolutely, my suggestion for a modern cross platform toolkit is FLTK or FOX. GTK is a kitchensink and has serious issues on IRIX, and QT is just as bloated, has an esoteric build system, windowsisms, and modern qt5 requires dbus (on FreeBSD at least, even tried building manually). There's a million and one reasons why they're both terrible not just on IRIX but in general.

That all said, Motif is far from the worst choice.

[hamei]

  it's, regrettably, quite obsolete now. 

As is every single piece of SGI hardware ......