Introduction

GTK+ 2.0 Tutorial
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# Introduction

GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed using the LGPL license, so you can develop open software, free software, or even commercial non-free software using GTK without having to spend anything for licenses or royalties.

It's called the GIMP toolkit because it was originally written for developing the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), but GTK has now been used in a large number of software projects, including the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) project. GTK is built on top of GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) which is basically a wrapper around the low-level functions for accessing the underlying windowing functions (Xlib in the case of the X windows system), and gdk-pixbuf, a library for client-side image manipulation.

GTK is essentially an object oriented application programmers interface (API). Although written completely in C, it is implemented using the idea of classes and callback functions (pointers to functions).

There is also a third component called GLib which contains a few replacements for some standard calls, as well as some additional functions for handling linked lists, etc. The replacement functions are used to increase GTK's portability, as some of the functions implemented here are not available or are nonstandard on other Unixes such as g_strerror(). Some also contain enhancements to the libc versions, such as g_malloc() that has enhanced debugging utilities.

In version 2.0, GLib has picked up the type system which forms the foundation for GTK's class hierarchy, the signal system which is used throughout GTK, a thread API which abstracts the different native thread APIs of the various platforms and a facility for loading modules.

As the last component, GTK uses the Pango library for internationalized text output.

This tutorial describes the C interface to GTK. There are GTK bindings for many other languages including C++, Guile, Perl, Python, TOM, Ada95, Objective C, Free Pascal, Eiffel, Java and C#. If you intend to use another language's bindings to GTK, look at that binding's documentation first. In some cases that documentation may describe some important conventions (which you should know first) and then refer you back to this tutorial. There are also some cross-platform APIs (such as wxWindows and V) which use GTK as one of their target platforms; again, consult their documentation first.

If you're developing your GTK application in C++, a few extra notes are in order. There's a C++ binding to GTK called GTK--, which provides a more C++-like interface to GTK; you should probably look into this instead. If you don't like that approach for whatever reason, there are two alternatives for using GTK. First, you can use only the C subset of C++ when interfacing with GTK and then use the C interface as described in this tutorial. Second, you can use GTK and C++ together by declaring all callbacks as static functions in C++ classes, and again calling GTK using its C interface. If you choose this last approach, you can include as the callback's data value a pointer to the object to be manipulated (the so-called "this" value). Selecting between these options is simply a matter of preference, since in all three approaches you get C++ and GTK. None of these approaches requires the use of a specialized preprocessor, so no matter what you choose you can use standard C++ with GTK.

This tutorial is an attempt to document as much as possible of GTK, but it is by no means complete. This tutorial assumes a good understanding of C, and how to create C programs. It would be a great benefit for the reader to have previous X programming experience, but it shouldn't be necessary. If you are learning GTK as your first widget set, please comment on how you found this tutorial, and what you had trouble with. There are also C++, Objective C, ADA, Guile and other language bindings available, but I don't follow these.

This document is a "work in progress". Please look for updates on http://www.gtk.org/.

I would very much like to hear of any problems you have learning GTK from this document, and would appreciate input as to how it may be improved. Please see the section on Contributing for further information.

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