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> without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) Does it support accessibility, DPI independence, layouts that automatic

by wk_end 4y ago

> without missing much functionality (at least from a pure "functionality" perspective) Does it support accessibility, DPI independence, layouts that automatically resize (important when you need to support different languages), right-to-left text...? Many "modern" toolkits struggle with stuff like this - it'd be really cool (and maybe even useful?) if Motif had that stuff down.

badsectoracula 4y ago
> accessibility I don't know about that, Motif was used (and in some circles is still used) a lot with government and scientific projects so it might have something but that is just guesswork. If it has it'd be something specific to it. > DPI independence Depends on what you mean with this. Motif was made to work in a large number of different systems with different graphics abilities so it can use arbitrary text and gap sizes, a large part of the visual side can be customized to make it work at any DPI. I think it can also use the DPI settings from the X server to adjust sizes too. However it doesn't have automatic and dynamic scaling in mixed DPI scenarios since there isn't any commonly accepted mechanism for X11 toolkits to do that (this is more of a political/social issue than a technical one - the X server already provides all the necessary information and functionality but there needs to be something akin to EWMH -or even a new version of EWMH- to standardize messages and behavior for handling DPI dynamically). > layouts that automatically resize It was one of the first toolkits to provide such functionality. > right-to-left text AFAIK it has support for both right-to-left and top-to-bottom (for, e.g., Chinese) text layout support. However that is only about layout, i think Motif can only use either core fonts or Xft, so you do not get proper support for Arabic, etc. Regardless what i had in mind with "pure functionality perspective" was about things like having working GUI elements such as buttons, menus, windows, lists, dialogs, events, etc, etc - i.e. the necessary bits for all toolkits to have to be "GUI toolkits" :-P. I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. Sadly it was open sourced about a decade too late to gain any momentum.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. It is developed but not in the style of say, GTK. The goal is to add more image formats and make it modern without breaking existing functionality. And this is good.

by wk_end 4y ago

badsectoracula 4y ago

> accessibility I don't know about that, Motif was used (and in some circles is still used) a lot with government and scientific projects so it might have something but that is just guesswork. If it has it'd be something specific to it. > DPI independence Depends on what you mean with this. Motif was made to work in a large number of different systems with different graphics abilities so it can use arbitrary text and gap sizes, a large part of the visual side can be customized to make it work at any DPI. I think it can also use the DPI settings from the X server to adjust sizes too. However it doesn't have automatic and dynamic scaling in mixed DPI scenarios since there isn't any commonly accepted mechanism for X11 toolkits to do that (this is more of a political/social issue than a technical one - the X server already provides all the necessary information and functionality but there needs to be something akin to EWMH -or even a new version of EWMH- to standardize messages and behavior for handling DPI dynamically). > layouts that automatically resize It was one of the first toolkits to provide such functionality. > right-to-left text AFAIK it has support for both right-to-left and top-to-bottom (for, e.g., Chinese) text layout support. However that is only about layout, i think Motif can only use either core fonts or Xft, so you do not get proper support for Arabic, etc. Regardless what i had in mind with "pure functionality perspective" was about things like having working GUI elements such as buttons, menus, windows, lists, dialogs, events, etc, etc - i.e. the necessary bits for all toolkits to have to be "GUI toolkits" :-P. I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. Sadly it was open sourced about a decade too late to gain any momentum.

hulitu 4y ago
> I don't know if Motif itself is developed much anymore though, i took a look in the SourceForge repository some time ago and seemed that development dried up. It is developed but not in the style of say, GTK. The goal is to add more image formats and make it modern without breaking existing functionality. And this is good.