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Welcome to In this book, you will acquire a comprehensive understanding of GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) that can help you to become a proficient graphical programmer. Before continuing, you should be aware that this book is aimed at C programmers, so we will jump right into using GTK+. Time will not be spent covering information you already know.

In Chapter 1, you were given an overview of the things available to you in the GTK+ libraries as a graphical application developer. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to write your own GTK+ applications.

Chapter 2 showed you the basic essentials you will need in every GTK+ application you create. It also introduced you to signals, events, callback functions, the GtkLabel widget, the GtkButton widget, and the GtkContainer class.

So far, you have not learned about any widgets that are designed to facilitate user interaction except GtkButton. That changes in this chapter, as we will cover many types of widgets that allow the user to make choices, change settings, or input information.

This chapter introduces you to a special type of window called a dialog. Dialogs are windows that supplement the top-level window. The dialog is provided by GtkDialog, a child class of GtkWindow, extended with additional functionality. This means it is possible to implement your entire interface in one or more dialogs, while leaving the main window hidden.

Now that you have a reasonable grasp of GTK+ and a number of simple widgets, it is time to move to another library. GTK+ depends on GLib, a general-purpose library that provides many kinds of utility functions, data types, and wrapper functions. In fact, you have already used some aspects of GLib in previous chapters.

In Chapter 6, you learned about a large number of utilities, data structures, and other types of functionality provided by GLib, so there are very few further things about GLib that you will learn throughout the book. Instead, you will apply the knowledge that you have gained in Chapter 6 to future examples and exercises.

This chapter will show you how to use the GtkScrolledWindow widget in combination with another powerful widget known as GtkTreeView. The tree view widget can be used to display data in lists or trees that span one or many columns. For example, a GtkTreeView can be used to implement a file browser or display the build the output of an integrated development environment.

This chapter will teach you how to create pop-up menus, menu bars, and toolbars. You will begin by creating each manually, so you learn how the widgets are constructed. This will give you a firm understanding of all of the concepts on which menus and toolbars rely.

By now, you have learned a great deal about GTK+ and its supporting libraries and are able to create fairly complex applications. However, manually writing all of the code to create and configure the widgets and behavior for these applications can quickly become tedious.