MotifCentral: all things Motif/Xt/Xlib

Over the last few days and weeks or so, a few of the people I follow and interact with on Fedi have been talking about centralising information, tools, applications, and expertise from the Motif (and Xt, Xlib, and X11) ecosystem. There's a ton of information, resources, and actively maintained applications out there, but it's all spread out and sometimes difficult to find, and so Thomas Adam - one of the core developers of FVWM, among other things, as well as creator of CoW (FVWM for Wayland, more or less) - has created an effort to centralise all of this.

Motif Central brings together information about Motif, Xt, Xlib and X11: how they fit together, how to program with them, and where to find the manuals, examples and historical material that explain them.

Begin with the X programming stack, build your first Motif application, or explore the programming resources. The history pages describe the libraries' origins, while the archive guide helps you navigate older documentation.

MotifCentral

There's been a whole flurry of activity around Motif lately, including the updated and maintained fork we talked about a few weeks ago. The people loosely collaborating on MotifCentral also submitted patches to CDE to make sure it works on the new Motif fork, with the CDE developers setting up a build pipeline for easier testing. Making sure CDE, the classic Motif desktop environment, works well with the maintained Motif fork quite a few people seem to be rallying around is a worthwhile effort.

We're still quite far from a complete(-ish) modern Motif ecosystem, but it's very heartwarming to see just how many people are actually still interested in it. My perhaps misguided hope is that we can somehow get to a modernised Motif/CDE desktop environment and applications, making it possible to more easily run a modern Motif environment on Linux and the BSDs.

One may dream.