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Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

I think it makes sense to try and cycle the majority of the dependency network to the new versions but I also think it probably makes sense to let the old toolkits live on indefinitely (maybe strategically drop the webkit stuff everything else should be low maintenance) for a variety of reasons, particularly old commercial software.

It is comical in some sense that a Motif app of yore would've been a great "investment" in terms of still functioning now and for the foreseeable future.. sort of like Win32/MFC.

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> Motif app of yore would've been a great "investment" ... sort of like Win32/MFC.

I've slowly started getting back to desktop Linux, and honestly Motif (mwm) is fine for my needs. Maybe fvwm would be slightly better.

If I where to do my career over, I'd consider going for C++ and Win32, it seems like a stable performant platform (I get that there's other problems on modern Windows).

wine is the stable abi on Linux.

For those who don't know the reference: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

oh I'm pretty sure I've seen that a long time before. funnily enough there was a time if you had both an os x partition for Mac os and an ext2/3 partition for Linux, the only way to share files freely between the two was through a fat32 partition.

Are you referring to exFAT?

that's only since 2009 on Linux and snow leopard in 2010. in the years before, you had to do fat32.

> wine is the stable abi on Linux.

When it works, yes. Unfortunately, the quality of open source software, especially of big projects, has gone downhill in the later years.

I'm using mwm right now, and a motif build of emacs.

EMWM there, with a Vim build of Motif too.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

So there must be at least three of us. Hi!

Hello. BTW, if there's no Motif tool available, there's always TCL/TK. As an example, TKDiff.

Or a Gemini/Gopher client:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG

It just requieres TCL/TK and tcl-tls. It's run faster than compiled browsers, even if the browsers have Javascript disabled. Services:

gemini://gemi.dev News Waffle, perfect for newspapers, no ads, no 700 cookies tracking you.

gopher://magical.fish Big portal, good news service

gopher://hngopher.com HN

gopher://gopherddit.com Reddit

Motif and Xaw will bury us all!

I'm learning Motif just for fun with "Vol6a" and it's fairly easier than Xaw. When Motif was propietary, GNU users did an astounding work with LessTif, as programming in Xaw was far more level and prone to bugs because you had to keep more stuff set.

Also, Xaw3D was a good effort on mimicking Motif widgets, but it had the same exact API as Xaw. And, finally, in late 90's TCL/TK had a big boost under GNU distros because it was a quick way to plug an UI over some C software.

If you like Motif, you might like EMWM too. WIth the suggest addons and extras, it's like a mini-DWM from IRIX minus the launching dock; altough you don't need it, the toolbar it's more than enough.

A pity Mosaic it's propietary; adding auth support for NNTP it's something every C novice could do under 2 minutes with a printf (and I did). But there's some nice TCL/TK software which just requires tcl-tls and a plain TCL/TK install:

https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG

EMWM looks fun. I've got a NetBSD laptop running CDE for nostalgia and it is surprisingly a joy to use. I don't think CDE has undergone the same protocol modernization and doing so would be a lot more work there.

CDE got XFT thanks to Motif support but I'm not sure about UTF-8.

I have to try the UTF-8 test file with Nedit-XFT. EMWM should perfectly work then.

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