4 ms·
TIL: xrdb translations. 25 years of X usage, and that one has somehow managed to evade me. Such an awesome (and now that I learned about it - obvious) thing.
by scbrg 7y ago
TIL: xrdb translations.
25 years of X usage, and that one has somehow managed to evade me. Such an awesome (and now that I learned about it - obvious) thing.
- teddyh 7y agoThese only work with programs written using (and linked to) Xt, the X Toolkit, or something which uses Xt internally, like the X Athena Widgets. More modern toolkit libraries like GTK or Qt are not using Xt, since Xt is ancient; modern toolkit libraries are written directly on top of Xlib or the even more modern XCB.
- mhd 7y agoI don't see age being the prime factor here. The X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt) are actually a quite nice framework if you want to have an abstraction over Xlib, want some nice event loop functionality or OO features in C. I think I even remember someone writing a paper about using it without a GUI way back when. Not using it was mostly done because you want to be cross-platform at that level, aren't using C as your core language (Qt, Tk) or just the usual case of NIH you get everywhere (Gtk, which rather invented glib).
- oso2k 7y agoI did Xt in college for a Unix Graphics Programming class and it felt so alien to me. The examples in the books (3 or 4 books) we had never seemed to work right. When compared to plain Xlib, OpenGL immediate mode and 3D mode, Java’s AWT and Swing, or even the tiny bit of Win32 I picked up via NanoX/Microwindows, Xt always just felt like dereference vomit, arcane property setting in unrelated objects or contexts and an event loop that magically picked up some events but not others. It was like there was some undocumented state machines that backed the event loop.