XMGED - Introduction

# Introduction

The primary motivation to design a new graphical user interface (GUI) for mged was to take advantage of the X toolkit (XT) and the look and feel of the widget sets that are layered on top of that. The old mged was clean and functional. Only buttons that were valid for a particular context were displayed. This idea was embraced and kept in the forefront when designing the new GUI.

The X display manager has been rewritten to make use of Motif widgets. Any number of drawing areas can now be opened for drawing. This ability was created in order to display copies of the drawing area on different workstations for the purpose of training, or for collaboration with colleagues. Input events such as buttonpress, keypress, and pointer motion, can be captured as usual in the drawing window(s) or remotely, on the GUI display, using the input window. The input window is active only if the GUI is not combined with a drawing area. The GUI and drawing area 0 will be combined if, during the initial prompting for display names, the display name of drawing area 0 is the same as the display name of the GUI. Also, if running mged on an sgi, mged will open a gl window for the drawing area if displaying on an sgi, otherwise it will open an X window. If the drawing area is an X window and the X display supports color, then the solids will now be drawn in a color that closely matches the assigned color. The usual assortment of display managers are still available, however, this information pertains only to the X display manager.

A few new commands and buttons have also been added. All of the new commands are display manager independent except for the button and slider commands. These commands will only work properly when using the X display manager. Aside from this, mged as a whole will continue to function as before. The new buttons pertain only to the X display manager. They have been added to access other new features that are display manager dependent. These features, as well as the new commands are explained in detail below. Also, listed at the end of this document are new environment variables, pertinent X resources, future enhancements, a sample source file, and fallback X resources.

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