XView

Not to be confused with xview, an alias for the xloadimage image viewer.

XView is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988. It provides an OPEN LOOK user interface for X Window System applications, with an object-oriented application programming interface (API) for the C programming language. Its interface, controls, and layouts are very close to that of the earlier SunView window system, making it easy to convert existing applications from SunView to X. Sun also produced the User Interface Toolkit (UIT), a C++ API to XView.

XView provides a semi-futuristic hi-tech user interface for X Window System applications which had been standardized by a larger group of manufacturers and software companies as the "OPEN LOOK system's specification".

The XView source code has been freely available since the early 1990s, making it the "first open-source professional-quality X Window System toolkit". XView was later abandoned by Sun in favor of Motif (the basis of CDE), and more recently GTK+ (the basis of GNOME).

SunView was reputedly the first system to use right-button context menus, which are now ubiquitous among computer user interfaces; XView as the first "instance" for X ported the contextual concept to the X Window System.

The last XView releases included true-color patches and XPM/JPEG/PNG patches for the menus and icons. Internationalization (aka. I17N) is supported, but Unicode or UTF-8/16/32 are not, simply because XView is older than them. And, of course, the open-source XView does not support DPS/NeWS/HyperTalk. In modern terms, XView is just a framework supplying a WM and demos.

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