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blue sky: user interface

which widgets wish?
April 20th
Submitted by Paul Phillips <paulp@go2net.com> to UI.

Netscape uses Motif widgets under Unix. Motif is not free. Some people do not like Motif. So there is a lot of theorizing about changing the widget set to something like GTK.

There are also a lot of theorizing (among different people) that such time would be far better spent on completing the free Motif re-implementation LessTif, which has been a work in progress for quite a long time.

Advocates of working on LessTif correctly point out that Motif is a de facto standard in the UNIX world, and that's not going to change any time soon. A lot of projects would really benefit from having a robust LessTif, so there are side benefits for other free software. And it seems wasteful to have programmers good enough to be worrying about this sort of thing re-working GUI code.

People are going to want to do both, and it's a big world, so go crazy. There's a LessTif mailing list at the LessTif web site, and a GTK list among the mozilla.org mailing lists and newsgroups. Also see QtScape, a Qt port.