June 21st 2000 Tony Gale Shawn Amundson Emmanuel Deloget This document is intended to answer questions that are likely to be frequently asked by programmers using GTK+ or people who are just looking at using GTK+. Here's a paragraph of text because it is stylistically poor to start a section right after the chapter title. The FAQ authors want to thank: Havoc Pennington Erik Mouw Owen Taylor Tim Janik Thomas Mailund Jensen Joe Pfeiffer Andy Kahn Federico Mena Quntero Damon Chaplin and all the members of the GTK+ lists If we forgot you, please email us! Thanks again (I know, it's really short :) The original authors of GTK+ were: Peter Mattis Spencer Kimball Josh MacDonald Since then, much has been added by others. Please see the AUTHORS file in the distribution for the GTK+ Team. GTK+ is a small and efficient widget set designed with the general look and feel of Motif. In reality, it looks much better than Motif. It contains common widgets and some more complex widgets such as a file selection, and color selection widgets. GTK+ provides some unique features. (At least, I know of no other widget library which provides them). For example, a button does not contain a label, it contains a child widget, which in most instances will be a label. However, the child widget can also be a pixmap, image or any combination possible the programmer desires. This flexibility is adhered to throughout the library. Peter Mattis informed the gtk mailing list that: I originally wrote gtk which included the three libraries, libglib, libgdk and libgtk. It featured a flat widget hierarchy. That is, you couldn't derive a new widget from an existing one. And it contained a more standard callback mechanism instead of the signal mechanism now present in gtk+. The + was added to distinguish between the original version of gtk and the new version. You can think of it as being an enhancement to the original gtk that adds object oriented features. GTK+ == Gimp Toolkit GDK == GTK+ Drawing Kit GLib == G Libray In the GTK+ distribution's doc/ directory you will find the reference material for both GTK and GDK, this FAQ and the GTK Tutorial. In addition, you can find links to HTML versions of these documents by going to http://www.gtk.org/. A packaged version of the GTK Tutorial, with SGML, HTML, Postscript, DVI and text versions can be found in ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/tutorial There are now a couple of books available that deal with programming GTK+, GDK and GNOME: Eric Harlows book entitled "Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK". The ISBN is 0-7357-0021-4 The example code from Eric's book is available on-line at http://www.bcpl.net/~eharlow/book Havoc Pennington has released a book called "GTK+/GNOME Application Development". The ISBN is 0-7357-0078-8 The free version of the book lives here: http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/ And Havoc maintains information about it and errata here: http://pobox.com/~hp/gnome-app-devel.html Information on mailing lists relating to GTK+ can be found at: http://www.gtk.org/mailinglists.html First, make sure your question isn't answered in the documentation, this FAQ or the tutorial. Done that? You're sure you've done that, right? In that case, the best place to post questions is to the GTK+ mailing list. Bugs should be reported to the GNOME bug tracking system (http://bugs.gnome.org). To report a problem about GTK+, send mail to submit@bugs.gnome.org. The subject of the mail should describe your problem. In the body of the mail, you should first include a "pseudo-header" that gives the package and version number. This should be separated by a blank line from the actual headers. Package: gtk+ Version: 1.2.0 Substitute 1.2.0 with the version of GTK+ that you have installed. Then describe the bug. Include: Information about your system. For instance: What operating system and version What version of X For Linux, what version of the C library And anything else you think is relevant. How to reproduce the bug. If you can reproduce it with the testgtk program that is built in the gtk/ subdirectory, that will be most convenient. Otherwise, please include a short test program that exhibits the behavior. As a last resort, you can also provide a pointer to a larger piece of software that can be downloaded. (Bugs that can be reproduced within the GIMP are almost as good as bugs that can be reproduced in testgtk. If you are reporting a bug found with the GIMP, please include the version number of the GIMP you are using) If the bug was a crash, the exact text that was printed out when the crash occured. Further information such as stack traces may be useful, but are not necessary. If you do send a stack trace, and the error is an X error, it will be more useful if the stacktrace is produced running the test program with the --sync command line option. There is an on going port of GTK+ to the Windows platform which is making impressive progress. See http://www.iki.fi/tml/gimp/win32 for more information. Ask on gtk-list for suggestions. There are at least three IRC clients already under development (probably more in fact. The server at http://www.forcix.cx/irc-clients.html list a bunch of them). X-Chat. girc. (Included with GNOME) gsirc. (In the gnome CVS tree) Although this booklet is quite complete, here I will mention some details I never got to. Here's an example of how to say dude: DUDE.