Introduction to GTK+

GTK+ is a toolkit designed to facilitate the development of application using a standard graphics user interface. It was initially created as a tool used in the production of The GIMP, a graphics design package, and GTK stands for "GIMP ToolKit".

It is useful for producing far more than just the GIMP, however, and has been applied to almost every kind of GUI application imaginable, including CD music players (gcd/grip), ftp clients (gftp), even web-browsers (Mozilla) and Desktop Environments (GNOME). And, of course, gworldclock :).

This talk aims to provide a brief introduction to GTK+ and GUI programming. We first look at some of the ideas behind GUI programming in general, then consider the specific implementation of GTK itself. References are given for further learning.

Note that these pages refer to GTK+ v1.2, although they do not go deep into the details of the implementation of GTK+. Prepared July 2000.

  1. GUI programming
  2. First things in GTK+
  3. Putting things together
  4. Compiling GTK+ applications
  5. Supplementary libraries: GDK, GLIB
  6. Links and further reading