[Raion]

I cannot generally stand the way GTK, and gobject and stuff work, so I mostly have avoided them. QT is maybe a bit better, but I'm just not interested in the way it looks.

Motif has the right aesthetic, but it's hard for me to program, especially off other people's code.

I like FLTK, but the fact that it has complexities for certain types of callbacks and no native C bindings is annoying to me.

I had someone say I should just try straight XCB or Xlib, I gave up quickly with both.

I've not tried Xforms, FOX or other toolkits out there.  kinda looking for the following:

1, the ability to use the library easily with C99

2. A relatively simple look that's not too "pretty" and doesn't go for lots of extra bits

3. Decently portable, flexible and somewhat maintained?

What fits this best? I have hit the point I can read GUI code from Motif and FLTK and some dialects of GTK to some degree, but I haven't specialized.

Also, if you're suggesting Motif, I'd REALLY appreciate materials on more advanced topics, especially programming exercises.

[shrek]

There's no free lunch in computing. Motif is hard to program with but the end result is really nice. Worth the extra effort IMO

Arriving at my house by Friday is a used copy of "The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif 2nd Edition by Douglas A. Young" I picked up for $10 on Amazon. It was so cheap I figured it's worth a shot. The online resources for Motif programming are not very good and incomplete with a lot of dead links. Motif is such an old toolkit that physical books are probably a better way to learn it

Book link https://www.amazon.com/dp/0131238035

[jimmer]

Arriving at my house by Friday is a used copy of "The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif 2nd Edition by Douglas A. Young" I picked up for $10 on Amazon. It was so cheap I figured it's worth a shot.

This book is worth it's weight in gold. ViewKit is based on the work Doug Young details in this book.

My copy is in some sealed box someplace - I'll have to go open all of them and find it.

Anyhow, it's been fun digging up the distant past this weekend. So far I have Xorg, Motif and ViewKlass working on Alpine Linnerx in a virtualbox. Spent way too much time reacquainting myself with editres, xrdb, .Xresources and .xinitrc, but so far so good-ish. In the days ahead I'll see how much I remember of my C++.

[commodorejohn]

I've never tried to develop anything with it myself, but what I can find for example code for WINGs looks fairly non-hateful, and the toolkit itself strikes a reasonable balance of simplicity, portability, and usability. I ran WM on OpenBSD without issue on a 133MHz 128MB Ultra 1 for a while; applications might lag, but the desktop environment was perfectly responsive

[Raion]

Hey John, I do appreciate the suggestion but the look of WINGs is unfortunately not my thing. It looks wayy too OpenStep/Nextstep-y and that's just not what I'm after -- but I didn't realize it existed, so hey that's new.

[x64k]

What kind of look are you looking for? Or... well, you did mention that in the first post -- I think what I want to ask is what kind of look are you trying to avoid :-D?

Qt has a Motif style (and a separate CDE style, for that matter) that looks fairly believable, and it supports colour themes. It's obviously not 100% identical to the real deal but it's a lot closer than any Motif theme for GTK can ever be, and the documentation (as far as QtWidgets goes) is exceptional. On the other hand, it's C++.

WINGs does indeed clone the NS look, pretty much by design. It's also not a super-generic thing, it was originally developed for use with WindowMaker, so it does require a bunch of handcrafting for things that WindowMaker never needed. It is very light though, much lighter than Qt.

What else... there's libui (https://github.com/andlabs/libui), which I hear good things about, and it's reasonably straightforward C. Portability is an explicit goal, but on nixes, its backend is GTK, so it's limited to the platforms GTK supports, and is obviously no more lightweight than GTK (which is to say... not that light). It natively checks all but item 2 on your list, where it depends on GTK.

FOX also checks all but the second and third item. It's pretty solid and it's still maintained. But I don't think I've ever written more than a few tutorials, more than 10 years ago, so I can't say I remember much...

[jan-jaap]

If your target is IRIX, the native toolkit is Motif. A GUI builder like BXpro or RapidApp can take most of the pain out of it. Actually, I believe RapidApp is a scaled down version of BXpro.

For small GUI applets on IRIX I usually whip something up with RapidApp. Takes very little time and looks 100% native. RapidApp is from the IRIX 5.3 days but generates code that compiles just fine with MIPSpro on later IRIX versions.

For cross-platform development targeting a more current OS (Windows / macOS / Linux) I prefer QT.

[shrek]

Arriving at my house by Friday is a used copy of "The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif 2nd Edition by Douglas A. Young" I picked up for $10 on Amazon. It was so cheap I figured it's worth a shot.

This book is worth it's weight in gold. ViewKit is based on the work Doug Young details in this book.

I had no idea Douglas Young worked for SGI. Anyways, on the topic of the thread I can give the book a short review after I get about half way into it. Some of the Amazon reviews for it are old enough to drink, which is kind of surreal 

[Raion]

I think I'm gonna stick with Motif /for now/ and learn it even better -- I can currently monkey out the early examples and stuff I found but for now I'm working on trying to build a decent text editor in under 3,000 lines.