Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!tcdcs!swift.cs.tcd.ie!jorice
From: jorice@swift.cs.tcd.ie
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Xw on Sparc? Xaw vs Xw vs XView? Interp layout contraints?
Message-ID: <6873.25ff8b27@swift.cs.tcd.ie>
Date: 15 Mar 90 12:31:35 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, Trinity College Dublin
Lines: 54

First, a genuine Paddy's Day goodwill wish from me in Ireland to all the nice
people who are going to answer my questions. You see, I want to know about the
Hewlett-Packard widget set Xw...    and about XView...

(1) Why no discussion of Xw? Is noone using it because it's unsupported, or
because it's horrible in some way that I haven't found yet, or are all the Xw
users so serenely happy with their system that they have no need to ask
questions?

(2) The original reason why I thought of using Xw is that it was the widget set
used in Douglas Young's book "Window Systems Programming and Applications with
Xt" and it seemed to look better and work better than the old version of the
Athena widgets (Xaw) that I was using at the time. What particularly pissed me
off about the old Xaw was its totally stupid method of laying out sub-widgets
in Forms that seemed to require that you map a widget before you could use its
outline coordinates for the relative positioning of another widget. Xw seems
better at this. Any comments? Are there any reasonably small widget sets that
use *dynamic* constraints for laying out sub-windows? What I'm talking about is
the sort of thing that's possible in Smalltalk, where all you have to say is
something like "window A is above window B, window A is to the left of window C
and window B is left-aligned with window C" and the system will reinterpret this
high-level specification each time a re-layout is necessary. I know there's
this lispy thing winterp for Motif, but this whole non-free thing about Motif
is bad news.

(3) After getting the version of Xw from the contrib section of the X11R4
release tape and compiling it, I was disappointed to see that it's not the 3-D
version that's used in Young's book (3-D as in buttons looking slightly raised,
text input boxes slightly sunken, etc.). Can this be got? I presume it has the
same programming interface so that all that's needed is a relinking?  What
other widget sets exist with a 3-D look that are reasonably small? XView offers
this, doesn't it? But that's a very large system. no? I don't have much disk
space here.

(4) On the subject of XView, how is it to program? I'm wary of it because I
found programming in SunView needlessly difficult and I think that SunView
applications look really clutzy. How much better is XView? How much disk space
does it take up when compiled, roughly?

(5) Some of the test programs that came with Xw don't seem to work correctly -
can someone tell me why? Generally, the little sash sub-widgets in VPaned
widgets don't work right. They always come up as blank white instead of black,
for a start, but the real hassle is that unless the server is switched to bug
compatibility mode, things bomb out when you try to grab the sash with the
pointer. The other odd problem is in the test program menuTest1, where the
pop-up menus brought up by clicking on the two lowest buttons just flash up on
the screen and then vanish again. My machine here is a Sun Sparcstation1
running SunOS 4.0.3c. Yes, I'm running Release 4 of X with at least some
patches applied. I've tried compiling the problem programs with both cc and gcc
with exactly the same effect.


Sorry this has been a bit long. Anyone who got this far, thanks for getting
this far.