X Athena Widgets or Xaw is a

GUI widget A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct ...

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

. Developed as part of Project Athena, Xaw was written under the auspices of the MIT X Consortium as a sample widget set built on X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt); Xt and Xaw are collectively known as the X Toolkit. Xaw has been largely superseded by more sophisticated toolkits like Motif, and later toolkits such as GTK, and Qt, but it is still maintained (by the

X.Org Foundation The X.Org Foundation is a non-profit corporation chartered to research, develop, support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics stack. This includes, but is not limited to, the following p ...

) and is available as part of most X Window System installations. The library, like other core parts of X, is licensed under the MIT License. In a talk for USENIX, X pioneer Jim Gettys remarked that although Athena widgets were "ugly", they were often used in the period of X history that he describes as the "Graphical user interface, GUI wars", as a safe alternative to the competing Motif and OPEN LOOK, Open Look toolkits.

References

External links

Xaw library 1.0.7 source code
X.Org Foundation website
Survey of Widget Sets
- comparisons of various Xaw versions.
Book
— X Toolkit Intrinsics Ref Man R5, Third Edition.

(an Xaw programming tutorial), GNU/Linux Fanatics Group Massachusetts Institute of Technology software X-based libraries Widget toolkits {{compu-graphics-stub