Hello, Aditya,
First, you will need to read up on programming under X. A reasonably
priced book published by Prentice-Hall India is "X Window System
Programming" by Barkakati, which has a comprehensive reference on X and
Motif library calls.
There are more expensive books, notably those published by O'Reilly, some
of which are out in their Indian editions. However, I don't know whether
the Indian editions of their books on X have appeared in the market.
To make X programming easy, you will need to learn how to use a toolkit.
The easiest one, IMO, is XForms for C programs. It is small, fast, comes
with a complete manual and a designer tool, which makes creating programs
in X (almost) as easy Visual Basic (well, not really). However, it does
not have many of the fancy graphic elements (widgets) you find in GTK and
Qt. It is possible to use XForms in other languages as well. The home page
is at http://bragg.phys.uwm.edu/xforms.
GTK is a toolkit for C programs, larger and a more complicated, with a
slightly weird (IMO) philosophy governing the layout of its widgets. A
fairly complete manual and a tutorial is available. A designer (Glade) is
also available, but many of the widgets have yet to be added. You can find
out more at http://www.gtk.org. A C++ wrapper, if you prefer to program in
C++, should be available by now.
Qt is a C++ toolkit, and comes with complete documentation and tutorial. I
dont know of any designer for Qt. Look up http://www.troll.no for more.
If you are new to X programming, XForms will make you productive fast. GTK
and Qt take more time to learn. All the three are widely used. By the way,
only GTK is free under GPL. XForms and Qt are free only for individual
use. So if you plan to do something commercial stay away from these two.
The standard toolkit in the Unix world is Motif, and costs a packet. A
free, source compatible version called (what else) Lesstif is available
from the Hungry programmers (:-) at www.hungry.com.
HTH,
Kartik.
On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Aditya Kulkarni wrote:
>
> Can anybody tell me how to program graphics under linux esp qt and gtk?
> i am currently working on curses.
>
>
> Aditya
>
>
