Hi, I just want to announce the last project I'm working on. It's called control[1]. It is a GUI widget set based on the X Toolkit Intrinsics framework[2]. I name it "control" after Plan 9's widget toolkit which is also called control (but there is only one or two programs using it in Plan 9).
Currently, the only implemented widget is the text input field (called `CtrlTextField` internally). There is a demonstration program in the demos/ directory. The demo program, called "prompt" is just a simple dmenu-like input field that echoes what the user types into the stdout when the user press Enter. Unlike dmenu, control's input field widget supports extended line editing features, like undo/redo (on Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Shift-Z), mouse-based cursor movement and emacs-like keybindings. For the input field, I'm still using UTF-8 points as whole characters, to move between input characters for example. An ideal solution would be to use something like libgrapheme. I'll use it in the future. You can run `make all` (or only `make`) to build the library, or `make demos` to build the demonstration programs (there's only one for now). Under the doc/ directory, there is an extensive manual page written in mdoc(7). One of the reasons I'm announcing this project here is that I think it may be interesting for suckless users and developers, as some suckless programs are X11 programs that implements basic widget functionalities from scratch (this is the case of dmenu, which implements text editing features in plain Xlib). The other reason is to ask for help, by invinting people to join me in this project. A widget set is only a set of widgets if there are more than one widget to make it a set (otherwise it's not a widget set, but a widget singleton). Anyone willing to work on a X11 toolkit, please mail me. The project is currently hosted in GitHub, but if you're not comfortable with Microsoft's GitHub(TM), I may host it somewhere else. There's still much to do in order for control to be usable. I need to write a Shell widget to communicate with the WM (so clicking the close button on the window manager also closes the application); I also need to write manager/composite widgets and other primitive widgets, like a label and a push button, which will be implemented as gadgets instead. Although the project is in its (very) initial stage, what do you think of it? Would you use (or program with) a GUI toolkit? The only simple and suckless-y widget set I know of is X11/Motif, but it is likely not developed anymore... It's kinda badly written, with an ugly codebase. Thanks, Lucas "seninha" de Sena (https://seninha.org) [1]: https://github.com/phillbush/control [2]: https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libXt/intrinsics.html
