Motif Programming Resources
#1
Motif Programming Resources
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.

I'm the system admin of this site. Private security technician, licensed locksmith, hack of a c developer and vintage computer enthusiast. 

https://contrib.irixnet.org/raion/ -- contributions and pieces that I'm working on currently. 

https://codeberg.org/SolusRaion -- Code repos I control

Technical problems should be sent my way.
Raion
Chief IRIX Officer

Trade Count: (9)
Posts: 4,240
Threads: 533
Joined: Nov 2017
Location: Eastern Virginia
Website Find Reply
08-01-2020, 05:16 AM
#2
RE: Motif Programming Resources
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.
dpr
O2

Trade Count: (0)
Posts: 1
Threads: 0
Joined: Aug 2020
Location: Redlands, California
Find Reply
08-08-2020, 02:11 AM
#3
RE: Motif Programming Resources
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.

I'm the system admin of this site. Private security technician, licensed locksmith, hack of a c developer and vintage computer enthusiast. 

https://contrib.irixnet.org/raion/ -- contributions and pieces that I'm working on currently. 

https://codeberg.org/SolusRaion -- Code repos I control

Technical problems should be sent my way.
Raion
Chief IRIX Officer

Trade Count: (9)
Posts: 4,240
Threads: 533
Joined: Nov 2017
Location: Eastern Virginia
Website Find Reply
08-08-2020, 02:27 AM
#4
RE: Motif Programming Resources
(08-08-2020, 02:11 AM)dpr Wrote:    it's, regrettably, quite obsolete now. 

As is every single piece of SGI hardware ......
(This post was last modified: 08-08-2020, 04:27 AM by hamei.)
hamei
broke-down old clunker

Trade Count: (0)
Posts: 380
Threads: 3
Joined: Jul 2019
Location: 上海
Find Reply
08-08-2020, 04:26 AM


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)