GTK+, or the Gimp Tool Kit, is the GUI toolkit used in
Gnome applications. GTK+ was originally written for the
Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program ---
https://www.gimp.org), but has become a
general-purpose library. GTK+ depends on glib.
The GTK+ package includes GDK, the Gimp Drawing Kit,
which is a simplification and abstraction of the
low-level X Window System libraries. Since GTK+ uses
GDK rather than calling X directly, a port of GDK
permits GTK+ to run on windowing systems other than X
with relatively few modifications. GTK+ and the Gimp
have already been ported to the Win32 platform in this
way.
GTK+ provides several features for Gnome applications:
-
A dynamic type system.
-
An object system written in C, complete with
inheritance, type checking, and a signal/callback
infrastructure. The type and object systems are not
GUI-specific.
-
A GtkWidget object
written using the object system, which defines the
interface GTK+'s graphical components implement.
-
A large collection of useful
GtkWidget subclasses (widgets); this collection forms the
bulk of GTK+'s code.
Gnome adds a number of additional widgets to the basic
GTK+ collection.
Gnome 1.0 is based on GTK+ version 1.2. All GTK+
versions beginning with 1.2 are compatible bug-fix
releases; 1.2.1, for example.
