Personal connection to the developer emerges
3 Sep 20 10:28 PM · 3d ago · 6 comments · 1 source · development 3 of 3
A commenter revealed a personal connection to the Motif fork maintainer, saying the developer is a friend who is now 'internet famous' from the discovery.
“Hah! That's a friend of mine. I'll have to let him know he's internet famous.”
lorddimwitUnknown Motif fork maintainer Motif fork developerOSNews Technology news outlet
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What people said 16 voices · verbatim
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TBH I think *all* of those toolkits produced more usable UIs than what's currently fashionable. Clear affordances and actually *visible* widgets.
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Someone's recently started [maintaining](https://codeberg.org/drj/xmbdfed) the classic BDF font editor, `xmbdfed`.
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Now that’s a name I've not heard in a long time (:
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Nice very wholesome news, esp. in these vibecoded times. I still remember the LessTif which lasted for sometime until Motif got FOSS'ed. [Hungry Programers](http://hungry.com/) who developed and maintained it, still has the same, very xemacs.org-esque site.
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Hah! That’s a friend of mine. I’ll have to let him know he’s internet famous.
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Everyone here talking about the Motif widgets being ugly, but I remember in 1992-ish using the Windows resource editor that came with Borland C++ for Windows to change the Windows 3.1 window controls and scrollbars to look like Motif/MWM.
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I never could stand the look of Motif / CDE, but I didn't have to actually use them much at all so maybe they had endearing behavioural quirks. I was quite enamoured with the look of NeXT / Openstep back in the day though.
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I kind of feel the same way, because when I got to college in 1995, this was my intro to the UNIX world and, beyond that, the internet at large. However it looked better in my mind's eye.
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While i will admit that it does look aged, I've always liked the look and feel...More so of course due to nostalgia...but i did like the - i don't know - maybe spartan approach and/or sort of minimalist almost? Even still the fact that someone/or group still maintains and i presume still uses it, is both pretty cool and a testament to open source…
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Unicode support! Last week I saw someone complain about nedit being motif and not supporting unicode/utf-8
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It was my first GUI editor on UNIX, and to this today I sometimes fire it up.
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Consistent keyboard shortcuts and clear indication of what the specific shortcuts were in each context was a real win. It looks pretty dated now, but it made excellent use of the limited display resolution of the time and was aesthetically a damn sight better than most of the competition.
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Proper Motif was still a lot more common, as the (statically linked) Netscape Navigator used it. I think LessTif never got beyond Motif 1.x. I think a commercial Motif library was the only pirated Linux software I ever had.
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On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the dumbest, how dumb would it be to add a MOTIF_BACKEND environment variable and wayland support?
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What are you talking about? Being able to see that there’s text underneath the menu text you’re trying to read is great :D
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It definitely looks better on a 640x480 CRT
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