Hello folks,
I am writing a GUI to a set of programs of mine. My main requirement is that it should work across several platforms (all UNIXs and Linux), not the beauty of the interface. The interface is also very simple (a few menus, and buttons), so I do not need advanced features of the toolkits. Should I use any toolkit (if so, which would be convenient across several platforms)?

My programs are completely ANSI C compliant, so porting them across UNIXs and Linux should be pretty simple. I thought of writing using just the Xlibs, without any toolkit. Would this be frowned upon? Also I would be happy to know if writing using only Xlibs would help overcome portability problems or if there are UNIX platforms that do not support Xlibs
Regards,
Maidros

All UNIX programs support XLib, and there's probably implementations for Windows too.

Don't use XLib. Take a look at the API; it's very low-level. You have routines to draw primative shapes, copy graphics around and capture mouse and keyboard events, and that's about it.

Qt is a very good cross-platform widget set that uses C++ (together with a metacompiler) and makes creating GUIs easy. There are also pleanty of cross-platform APIs out there that you could use. One such is SDL (www.libsdl.org) which is also quite low-level but at least takes advantage of hardware acceleration transparantly.

Searching freshmeat.net for “cross-platform widget toolkit” yields literally hundreds of results, many of which may be useful to you. http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=cross...&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

You could also programing with motif widgets if your application is for unix and linux

Thanks for the info. Will check Qt and freshmeat.

If Motif is supported on all UNIXs and Linux, it would serve my purpose admirably. Thanks for the info. I will check if
it is supported on all UNIXs.

How wide does "all UNIXs" mean for you ?

I guess that for a new project, you mean all Unixes that are still widely used:
Gnu/Linux major distributions (RH/Debian/Suse/...)
FreeBSD/OpenBSD
MacOS/X
Solaris
AIX
HP-UX
Irix
and probably a couple of others I'm missing.

There's a free open source motif clone available at:
http://www.lesstif.org/
that should work with all the O/S I listed.
Motif is included with Solaris, HP-UX and AIX (as part of CDE).
You'll find also information about the original motif, and specially the fact that it is now free to download/use on open source platforms:
http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/datasheet.html

Well, the platforms on which my program is expected to work include
GNU/ Linux (RH, Debian, Slackware, and other major ones)
*BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD)
AIX
Solaris
Irix
- that would be all, I think.

Quote:

There's a free open source motif clone available at: http://www.lesstif.org/ that should work with all the O/S I listed. Motif is included with Solaris, HP-UX and AIX (as part of CDE). You'll find also information about the original motif, and specially the fact that it is now free to download/use on open source platforms: http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/datasheet.html

Thanks - will check about the lesstif, and what platforms it is supported on. Thanks for the info.
Regards,
Maidros