Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

5 The Main Window

This chapter describes the Motif MainWindow widget, which can be used to frame many types of applications. The

MainWindow is a manager widget that provides a menu bar, a scrollable work area, and various other optional display

and control areas.

As discussed in Chapter 3, Overview of the Motif Toolkit, the main window of an application is the most visible and

the most used of all the windows in an application. It is the focal point of the user's interactions with the program, and

it is typically the place where the application provides most of its visual feedback. To encourage consistency across

the desktop, the Motif Style Guide suggests a generic main window layout, which can vary from application to

application, but is generally followed by most Motif applications. Such a layout is shown in the figure. As described

in Section #smainwindow, a main window can provide a menu bar, a work area, horizontal and vertical scrollbars, a

command area, and a message area.

The main window of a Motif program

In an effort to facilitate the task of building a main window, the Motif toolkit provides the MainWindow widget. This

widget supports the different areas of the generic main window layout. However, the MainWindow widget is not the

only way to handle the layout of the main window of your application. You are not required to use the MainWindow

widget and you should not feel that you need to follow the Motif specifications to the letter. While the Style Guide

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