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Is there a Motif version of WAVE ?

No. (Rant begins here.) When I designed WAVE , I attempted to use Motif, but switched to XView when it became clear that much of the documented functionality of the Motif toolkit (at the time, version 0.9) was unimplemented or unusable. It also seemed unlikely that anyone would prefer Motif's buggy, ugly, proprietary, bloated, kludgy procedural interface over XView's buggy, attractive, non-proprietary, streamlined, elegant object-oriented interface (end of rant).

  Motif and its lookalikes (notably GTK+, Qt, and LessTif) have clearly become the standard, however, and a consequence of this is that the Open Look user interface presented by WAVE is unfamiliar to many users. There is a scarcity of introductory material for Open Look in print (but there is an excellent and comprehensive set of documentation, including an Open Look User's Guide, available from Darwin Open Systems, http://www.darwinsys.com/). Unfortunately, the Motif API, and those of its lookalikes, are vastly different from the XView API with which WAVE is written, and a port to Motif would be decidedly non-trivial.

The GTKWave project is reimplementing the user interface of WAVE using the Gimp toolkit (GTK+). A beta-quality release of GTKWave is now available from PhysioNet. This offers a stable, object-oriented, and non-proprietary Motif-like interface under any version of Linux or Unix, and also under MS-Windows.


next up previous contents index
Next: How can I find out about ...? Up: What else can WAVE do? Previous: How can I use WAVE 's menu
George B. Moody (george@mit.edu)
2003-05-06