What's a Tolkit? And why two of them? I thought GTK was the Toolkit, GIMP was the Image Manipulation Program, and Gnome was the desktop Network Object Model Environment. Am I a revisionist here? (I certainly have my reservations about them!)
Exactly? If you're still holding out for GTK to be a non-Linux toolkit in 2023 then you're either an incredibly misguided contributor and/or ignorant of the history behind the toolkit. The old GTK does not exist anymore, you either use GNOME's stack or you don't.
Dude, I know. I've been implementing user interface toolkits since the early 80's, but I've still never heard of a "Tolkit", which you mentioned twice, so I asked you what it was -- are you making a silly pun like "Tollkit" for "Toolkit" or "Lamework" for "Framework" or "Bloatif" for "Motif" and I'm missing it? No hits on urban dictionary, even. And also you still haven't explained whether I'm a revisionist or not.
Just like you, I love to write articles about user interface stuff all the time, too. Just in the past week:
My enthusiastic but balanced response to somebody who EMPHATICALLY DEMANDED PIE MENUS ONLY for GIMP, and who loves pie fly, but pushed my button by defending the name GIMP by insisting that instead of the GIMP project simply and finally conceding its name is offensive, that our entire society adapt by globally re-signifying a widely known offensive hurtful word (so I suggested he first go try re-signifying the n-word first, and see how that went):
(While I would give more weight to the claim that the name GIMP is actually all about re-signifying an offensive term if it came from a qualified and empathic and wheelchair using interface designer like Haraldur Ingi Þorleifsson, I doubt that’s actually the real reason, just like it’s not white people’s job to re-signify the n-word by saying it all the time...)
Meet the man who is making Iceland wheelchair accessible one ramp at a time:
The article about redesigning GIMP we were discussing credited Blender with being the first to show what mouse buttons do what at the bottom of the screen, which actually the Lisp Machine deserves credit for, as far as I know:
I made a joke about how telling GIMP developers to make it more like Photoshop was like telling RMS to develop Open Software for Linux, instead of Free Software for GNU/Linux, and somebody took the bait so I flamed about the GIMP developer’s lack of listening skills:
Discussion about HTML Web Components, in which I confess my secret affair with XML, XSLT, obsolete proprietary Microsoft technologies, and Punkemon pie menus:
Deep interesting discussion about Blender 4.0 release notes, focusing on its historic development and its developer’s humility and openness to its users’ suggestions, in which I commented on its excellent Python integration.
After seeing this whole thread a day late, I have to wonder: is the unspoken difference what "cross-platform" and "always" mean to different posters? To someone with my historical perspective, it grates a bit to see X Windows conflated with Linux as a platform.
My memory of the early days is consistent with what the wikipedia page says about GIMP. It was cross-platform on the typical Unix workstations that were around the UC Berkeley campus labs and XCF. This was things like Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, Ultrix, and Irix.
Students in this milieu were just as likely to have some BSD variant on their home PC as Linux. I think it was later during and after the "Beowulf" scientific computing period when Linux started to dominate as the Unix-like platform for open source development.