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[Eirik Byrkjeflot Anonsen]

Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski <curious at bwv190.internetdsl.tpnet.pl> writes:

> i am not claiming toolkits are useless, was more adressing statements like
> "you really want" (for simple app - not really) and "qt and gtk are
> best choice" (quite bold, almost advertisement-like claim.

There are applications where you are better off bypassing toolkits and
coding towards X directly.  Maybe you have no GUI (e.g. devilspie,
xwininfo, xdpyinfo).  Maybe you want to use weird features of X that
interoperates badly with the current version of your chosen toolkit.

But as soon as you want proper multilingual text input or output, a file
dialog, a standard menu bar, or even want to support cut'n'paste, a
proper toolkit can save you a lot of pain.  (And don't get me started on
colour models, proper window manager integration, optimized rendering,
printing, skinning...)  Most "simple apps" want some of that.

(Besides, for most "simple apps" there is even less point in spending a
lot of effort on stuff that a toolkit will give you for free...)

Yes, there are other toolkits that can be used instead of qt or gtk.  I
still maintain that those are *probably* the best choices these days,
quite simply because I believe those are the big ones and thus
*probably* better tested, better documented and better supported.  Of
course, other toolkits may be better for some kinds of applications, and
some programmers will prefer differently designed APIs.

eirik