GTK+ - Features

Stability

GTK+ has been developed for over a decade to be able to deliver the enticing features and superb performance that it brings to your application development. GTK+ is supported by a large community of developers and has core maintainers from companies such as Red Hat, Novell, Lanedo and Opened Hand.

Cross Platform

Originally GTK+ was developed for X Windows but it has grown over the years to include backend support for other well known windowing systems. Today you can use GTK+ on:

Language Bindings

GTK+ is available in many other programming languages thanks to the language bindings available. This makes GTK+ quite an attractive toolkit for application development.

Mobile

The GMAE (GNOME Mobile & Embedded) initiative has advanced the use, development and commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience platform. It has brought together industry leaders, expert consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations they represent. As a direct result of this, GTK+ has features pertaining to mobile and embedded platform requirements.

GTK+ has been involved in a number of embedded initiatives over the past few years including the development of:

Accommodating

GTK+ caters for a number features that today's developers are looking for in a toolkit, they include:

Native look and feel
Theme support
Thread safe
Object orientated approach
Internationalization
Localization
Accessibility
Bidirectional text support (LTR/RTL, Left To Right/Right To Left)
UTF8 support
Documentation

Interfaces

GTK+ has a comprehensive collection of core widgets which include:

Windows (normal window or dialog, about and assistant dialogs)
Displays (label, image, progress bar, status bar)
Buttons and toggles (check buttons, radio buttons, toggle buttons and link buttons)
Numerical (horizontal or vertical scales and spin buttons) and text data entry (with or without completion)
Multi-line text editor
Tree, list and icon grid viewer (with customizable renderers and model/view separation)
Combo box (with or without an entry)
Menus (with images, radio buttons and check items)
Toolbars (with radio buttons, toggle buttons and menu buttons)
UI Manager (creating menus and toolbars from XML)
Selectors (color selection, file chooser, font selection)
Layouts (tabulated widget, table widget, expander widget, frames, separators and more)
Status icon (notification area on Linux, tray icon on Windows)
Printing widgets
Recently used documents (menu, dialog and manager)

Foundations

GTK+ is built on top of GLib. GLib provides the fundamental algorithmic language constructs commonly duplicated in applications. This library has features such as (this list is not a comprehensive list):

Object and type system
Main loop
Dynamic loading of modules (i.e. plug-ins)
Thread support
Timer support
Memory allocator
Threaded Queues (synchronous and asynchronous)
Lists (singly linked, doubly linked, double ended)
Hash tables
Arrays
Trees (N-ary and binary balanced)
String utilities and charset handling
Lexical scanner and XML parser
Base64 (encoding & decoding)