[Arm-netbook] Fwd: [trinity-devel] TDE Fundraiser

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 09:30:51PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 10:27:47PM -0400, David Niklas wrote:

> > And GTK is bad because?
> > If I were to write a graphical app in C wouldn't I *have* to use GTK?
> 
> No.  GTK is the Gimp toolkit, originally written for the GNU image manipulation 
> program.

And has since gone through major revisions. Its name is GTK+, BTW.

> 
> It uses (presumably) the X toolkit (I don't kow its name),

X Toolkit is Xt, not GTK+. GTK+ nowadays has several backends. On Linux
it can use either X or Wayland (or also Mir, in the Ubuntu variant).

> which is the 
> low-level interface to sending and receiving the network packets for the X 
> protocol with the ICCC -- the inter-client communications conventions, which 
> goern communicataions with a window manager.  

And also the compositor. And keep in mind that rendering is client side
nowadays.

> (I don't know how much of this 
> is now obsolete i ws using X in the 80's, and I gather it at least hs remained 
> more or less compatible; there's a lot less flexibility in X nowadays, as far 
> as I cana tell)
> 
> There's no reason other systems shouldn't be built directly on the X toolkit.

I happen to use a language (Hebrew) that requires some non-trivial
rendering. GTK+ and QT support this (at least the basics: display. More
complex layouts and rendering of edited text have their own gotchas) for
over 10 years. If you don't use them, each program has to add support
independently.

This may e.g. show up in window titles, because browsers may put the
title of pages there. The relatively minimalistic window manager I now
use (awesome) renders them just fine. Because it uses GTK+ (or at least
parts of the GTK+ stack). Another minimalistic WM I used to use (icewm)
added support for the library fribidi independently and thus should
properly render Hebrew and Arabic. But good luck with other complex
languages.

-- 
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