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Comment by bbanyc | Hacker News Reader

The "classic API" would probably be Xaw or Motif. Those haven't changed since practically before there was Linux.

Motif was the real "classic" API. But let's do a little justice to GTK1. Motif was still a proprietary library when GTK1 was released. GTK1 was also already easier to develop with, and the default look&feel was somehow better. For some reason, all the widgets in the Motif UI were huge. Given the small resolutions of that time, it was very space inefficient.

If I remember correctly, Xaw was part of X and predated Motif although it’s hard to really call Xaw a full UI; it was pretty bare bones and limited.

It’s worth keeping in mind that there were other Unix UIs that didn’t make it. For example, Sun NeWS was quite interesting (based on PostScript).

> For some reason, all the widgets in the Motif UI were huge.

Huge and IMO quite ugly. Also slow. Not that Xaw was pretty ( or even that functional). GTK1 was definitely a step in the right direction.

Xaw was also really awful to program in. When I tried using it once I ended up reverting to just plain Xlib and was much happier, even having to build my own widgets out of low level primitives.

The free clone "LessTif" already existed when "GTK+" 1.x came along.

I agree that GTK was much easier to program, and had a better feel but the look was mimicking Motif except that every widget instead used a shaded button-style border — and that looked very ugly IMHO.

However, GTK 1.x supported theme engines. Back in the day, my theme for GTK 1.x was one of the most popular, giving programs a look reminiscent of NeXTStep and Windows 95. The engine also (optionally) hacked the GTK widgets, adding triangular tabs and subtly improved menu behaviour. When GTK 2.0 came along, it had a much improved default look that felt like its own thing, and also the new menu behaviour so my theme wasn't needed any more.

Both Motif and Xaw were configurable with XResources, they could be as big and small as you wanted.

Then I would vote for Motif. But since it predates Linux, it is a classic Unix look, not Linux. For the younger crowd: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)>

OpenLook/XView is contemporary as well. And CDE is a thing, still.

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