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 m ...

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

. Developed as part of

Project Athena Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. , At ...

, Xaw was written under the auspices of the MIT

X Consortium The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been a ...

as a sample widget set built on

X Toolkit Intrinsics X Toolkit Intrinsics (also known as Xt, for X toolkit) is a library that implements an API to facilitate the development of programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) for the X Window System. It can be used in the C language (or any languag ...

(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 Xaw has been largely superseded by more sophisticated toolkits like Motif, and later toolkits such as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 GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both Free software, free and ...

, and Qt, but it is still maintained (by the X.Org Foundation) 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 The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

. In a talk for

USENIX USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

, X pioneer

Jim Gettys Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American computer programmer. Activity Gettys worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked ...

remarked that although Athena widgets were "ugly", they were often used in the period of X history that he describes as the " GUI wars", as a safe alternative to the competing Motif and 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