GTK+ 3 Is Now Officially Available On Windows

[vivo]

Are you sure? All QT applications I've tried so far look native on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Native and looking native are two different things. You can customise Linux to look like Windows, but it is NOT Windows.

[log0]

Neither GTK+ nor Qt uses native Windows widgets, both of them use styles to look natively. If you need to wrapped real native widgets try wxWidgets with wxMSW port, wxGTK/Win32 also not uses native widgets under Windows.

Qt uses OS provided style API afaik, so you'll get pretty much the same output as with the native toolkit, not sure about GTK+.

[AnonymousCoward]

Are you sure? All QT applications I've tried so far look native on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Try e.g. the tablet input methods, in a native Windows program marking the text in an input field will insert it into the input panel to edit, in a Qt program that doesn't work.

[Delgarde]

Are you sure? All QT applications I've tried so far look native on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

"Look native" being the key words. Like kosenko said, they use themes to get native styling - though the odds are good that if you change the themes used by Windows, you'll see faults appearing.

[darkcoder]

Are you sure? All QT applications I've tried so far look native on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

yes, they don't use native widgets. On some Windows visual style configurations you may find a little difference between the Qt apps style and native Windows style. But they simulate your actual Windows theme with a high degree of accuracy (Qt).

While GTK+ 3.10 is the latest stable release, today's Windows release is of GTK+ 3.6.4.

And that's why the Wireshark guys are moving to Qt. As long GTK keeps other platforms as second (or third) citizens they will keep losing market share.

[kosenko]

Are you sure? All QT applications I've tried so far look native on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Yes, absolutely. GTK+ and Qt draws widgets using uxtheme.dll with gtkwin32theme.c, QWindowsXPStyle and QWindowsVistaStyle.

GTK+/Qt widgets look like native but it is impossible to use native Windows Controls API with these widgets because it is not really native. It is a key difference between GTK+/Qt and wxWidgets approaches.

[darkcoder]

Qt uses OS provided style API afaik, so you'll get pretty much the same output as with the native toolkit, not sure about GTK+.

Haven't tested any GTK+ 3 app on Windows yet, but GIMP looks the same as in Gnome, so there is neither no native toolkit nor native skin. Only the default GTK+2 skin, which looks kind of awful on Windows.

[GreatEmerald]

Haven't tested any GTK+ 3 app on Windows yet, but GIMP looks the same as in Gnome, so there is neither no native toolkit nor native skin. Only the default GTK+2 skin, which looks kind of awful on Windows.

How exactly is GIMP not native-looking? The only thing that comes from GNOME are the icons, and the reason for that is obvious. The only difference I have noticed between it and native Win32 apps is that the menu item hover effect becomes all blue at times.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

GTK+ 3.0 worked on Windows flawlessly for a long time now. It's just that nobody was interested in wasting their time compiling and officially releasing binaries for it.

The moment Inkscape defaults to GTK+ 3.x this statement of wasting time will seem petty.

[Ancurio]

Do you know if it uses native Windows widgets (like QT)?

The last time I looked into the Win32 style code, it looked like GTK dlsym'd some core windows libraries and actually drew certain common widgets directly using the native methods, so yeah, they are as native as it gets I would think.