LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:23:54 +0930

comparative worth of Qt toolkit and GTK+ ?

Does anyone happen to have some comparative experiences with
the Qt toolkit and GTK+?

I'm finding that GTK+ is very _grey_ indeed - like dusk in Moscow on
an overcast day. (Now I know why the GIMP and ethereal have such a
grey look and feel.) 
But when I look at the Qt toolkit documentation, I get the impression
that it might not be that much better.

Apart from colour, I'm also interested in general interface sophistication,
like whether you can achieve a high level of control over packing
and positioning, and also control over border styles and other aspects of
style. I just find that GTK+ seems about a generation behind Perl/Tk
in terms of ease of control of the look and feel and functionality.

I gather that the Qt toolkit is to KDE what GTK+ is to the Gnome desktop.
That's my guess anyway.

Having just spent a week full-time exercising the various features of GTK+,
I don't really want to spend a week on the Qt toolkit if someone can tell
me the good or bad news for free.

Cheers,
Alan.

--------------------------------
Technical stuff:
PS. In case anyone out there was wondering how to get to get colour into
any widget in GTK+, I finally found a reference which gives the definitive
clue. It turns out that you have to put a GtkEventBox behind any object
you want to change the colour of, and you do a complex thing with the
GtkEventBox to change the colour of the thing on top of it.
It seems that the designers of GTK+ didn't want programmers to be able
to change colours of things - they wanted colours to be controlled
more from the rc-files of the user. This means that the GTK+ designers are
treating the programmers like little babies who can't be trusted to
do "the right thing" in regard to colours. More than one source indicated this.
Since when do users out-rank programmers!!?

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject