Comment by moregrist
1 day ago
If I remember correctly, Xaw was part of X and predated Motif although it’s hard to really call Xaw a full UI; it was pretty bare bones and limited.
It’s worth keeping in mind that there were other Unix UIs that didn’t make it. For example, Sun NeWS was quite interesting (based on PostScript).
> For some reason, all the widgets in the Motif UI were huge.
Huge and IMO quite ugly. Also slow. Not that Xaw was pretty ( or even that functional). GTK1 was definitely a step in the right direction.
Xaw was also really awful to program in. When I tried using it once I ended up reverting to just plain Xlib and was much happier, even having to build my own widgets out of low level primitives.