DECwindows Motif

Posted by doener 20 hours ago

3656Original

Comments

Comment by flomo 16 hours ago

I dunno what's interesting about this link, but Motif has been LGPL a while and the last release was in 2017.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_%28software%29

(in some alternate universe, motif was under the x11 license and you would have motif v13 instead of GTK.)

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

It's Motif on VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like

eventually HPE got tired of dealing with VMS customer requests and sold the rights to VMS Software Inc, who ported it from Itanium to x86 as soon as humanly possible

now VMS Software Inc, is stating that they wish to support ye olde DECWindows and Motif on the modern, x86-enabled VMS

Comment by mhd 15 hours ago

That's a cruel alternate universe, I would've hoped that Motif being in use by more people than just the devs of one homebrew Unix desktop would mean that we wouldn't have suffered through that much versionitis.

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

motif had the opposite of versionitis

from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful

it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`

Comment by shrubble 16 hours ago

There are at least, for those wanting a Linux or BSD based Motif fix:

Enhanced Motif Window Manager https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

and the full-fledged CDE desktop that uses Motif also:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (note that you want to firewall this somehow as the default settings on the background process ttdb can be a security hole)

Comment by nineteen999 14 hours ago

I got this patched and up and running on my own LFS distro a few years back, lots of fun. It even has some support for antialiased fonts these days.

Comment by snvzz 16 hours ago

UTF-8 support very welcome.

Comment by tokyobreakfast 17 hours ago

I miss Motif. This is a portal to a time when men were men and UNIX(R)—or in this case, VMS—desktops were utilitarian and did exactly what you needed and nothing more.

Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing. Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.

Comment by pjmlp 17 hours ago

Safe languages have nothing to do with it, case in point, the choice of programming languages available on VMS.

Which contrary to UNIX did not had the C mistake.

Rather Structured BASIC, Extended Pascal, COBOL, Modula-2, Fortran and Bliss.

It is really sloppy programming nowadays, regardless of the languages.

Comment by Tor3 15 hours ago

Hm? VMS also had K&R C, and a simulator I worked with at the time was written (not by me) using that compiler.

Comment by pjmlp 14 hours ago

Eventually, but it wasn't first class, rather to port UNIX software into VMS.

Just like MS-DOS had plenty of C compilers to chose from, while it was actually written in Assembly, and most folks were programming in Turbo and Quick Pascal, Turbo and Quick BASIC, Clipper,...

Hardly the same kind of C for everything like on UNIX.

Comment by Tor3 11 hours ago

That a lot of software wasn't written in C on VMS is beside the point, the fact is that a totally normal K&R C was available on VMS, just the same as e.g. Pascal was available. And the C compiler was popular among people writing TCP/IP software (and I don't mean re-compiling some Unix ftp client), where they could just sit down with Steven's book and code.

Comment by Tor3 3 hours ago

- Typo: I meant to write "Stevens' book"

Comment by fredoralive 14 hours ago

Unix software like X11 and Motif…

Comment by pjmlp 14 hours ago

Yes, they were even available MS-DOS via Coherent, but not the main way to develop software on the platform.

Comment by dhosek 15 hours ago

Indeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself.

Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).

Comment by nineteen999 14 hours ago

Much of VMS was eventually rewritten in C to accomodate the Alpha.

Comment by pjmlp 14 hours ago

By then it was OpenVMS.

Comment by cturner 17 hours ago

"did exactly what you needed and nothing more" You can still do that. Build a config for openbox or dwm. While the wm still compiles you can ignore the fads.

Comment by ofrzeta 17 hours ago

You can use a CDE lookalike https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Comment by jabl 17 hours ago

The real thing is open source since 2012 https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Comment by aninteger 17 hours ago

Time to port this to Wayland using Claude code, right?

Comment by RedShift1 14 hours ago

points finger you son of a bitch, I'm in.

Comment by toast0 16 hours ago

> Now we live in a time where we allocate GBs of RAM to eye candy that functionally accomplishes nothing.

Well, of course it takes more ram when we run 4x the pixels for the same size screen. And we double the refresh rate, but then hold everything back a frame to composite it. :P

Comment by ahartmetz 14 hours ago

I think the one frame delay is due to X11 clients rendering a frame, then the X compositor rendering a frame, both according to the usual timing rules. With Wayland, it should be easier for client and compositor to render in the same frame interval because the compositor properly controls frame timing. It can just tell clients to render slightly early, then use the remaining few milliseconds for compositing.

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

The Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with

The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit

Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.

Comment by anonymousiam 5 hours ago

I purchased a copy of OSF Motif for Linux (x86) sometime in the early 1990's (before it was free). I had used it before on SunOS and I liked it.

One of the most annoying things about it was that it did not address the endianness of the arguments to the library functions. So it worked fine on big endian platforms, but not so fine on little endian ones (such as Intel).

It would still work okay if you byte swapped the arguments in and out of the library functions, but it just seemed silly to need to do that, and it made it more difficult to write portable code.

Comment by jmward01 17 hours ago

I saw DEC windows and immediately thought of Windows NT 3.1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1

[edit]

So, I guess the history of 'windows NT' is lost on many. 'NT' started with version 3.1 as the MS/IBM breakup from the joint OS/2 venture happened. It was their first real push into 32 bit protected mode operating systems and supported really crazy cool things like 'multiple processors' and totally different architectures than x86, like DEC. Give the link a look.

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

the common element between VMS (the subject of this post) and Windows NT, is Dave cutler.

Cutler lived in an extremely overcomplicated world of VMS kernel primitives, and given the chance to let his freak flag fly, he really overcomplicated his past work for Windows NT

In case you ever wonder why your 1 gb/s ssd has ~100 mb/s throughput on windows. there are often quite literally hundreds of layers of filters on even the simplest i/o

but it is super flexible! just slower than iced treacle. aren't you glad you had an object oriented I/O subsystem supporting microkernel services and aspect-oriented programming? i bet you use those features way more often than you read or write files from disk

Comment by hnlmorg 16 hours ago

You’ve linked to NT, not Win 3.x

They were entirely different OSs.

Edit: the previous poster has since completely rewritten this comment to talk about windows NT. they originally talked about Windows (without the NT) then linked to an NT wiki. Hence my reply.

@OP Poor show on your ninja edit.

Comment by jmward01 16 hours ago

No, I linked to Windows NT 3.1. The history here is important. It supported DEC alpha, hence the post.

Comment by hnlmorg 16 hours ago

Except NT 3.1 is still NT and NT didn’t “invent” the 3.1 design. They modelled it after Windows 3.1 (though technically Windows 3.0) and named NT as NT 3.1 for brand familiarity.

So NT 3.1 != Windows 3.1

As you said “history here is important”.

Comment by jmward01 15 hours ago

I'm not sure what you think I was implying with my post? The history I was pointing out was Windows NT 3.1 supported the DEC alpha processor (3.1 was marketing and implied the UI was similar to windows 3.x, which it was). This was a connection between DEC and windows that I thought was interesting and not the subject of the post, but in some interesting ways ties the two together. DEC did many things for a very long time like make machines, operating systems and processors [1] and is likely good fodder for a top level HN post in its own right. I remember dreaming about running a DEC NT3.1 machine when I heard about it. I had a friend in the AF who showed me the install disks for NT 3.1, a double stack of 1.44mb 3.5" disks. It must have taken hours to install. Anyways, that is the linkage. Take a look. It is fun history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation

Comment by hnlmorg 14 hours ago

I'm old enough to have lived it. :)

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by jmward01 15 hours ago

I put '[edit]' and new comments below that and didn't edit anything above, including the link. The post above the edit is all original. I'm sorry you have been confused through this.

Comment by hnlmorg 15 hours ago

With the greatest of respect, if you’d put “Windows NT 3.1” originally then I wouldn’t have commented. But you didn’t.

Anyway, I think we’re both plenty experienced on both platforms so I don’t see any need for us to argue over NT or not to NT.

Comment by tombert 16 hours ago

I think NT is correct; NT was designed by Dave Cutler, who famously worked on VMS stuff before working for Microsoft. I think the poster was correct in posting NT.

Comment by hnlmorg 15 hours ago

No they’re not. The GUI design came from Windows 3.0. What NT do was take the design of that and the branding of Windows to help sell NT.

But NT 3.1 is a completely different OS to Windows 3.1.

They might look the same, but one has OS/2 heritage while the other has DOS heritage (to overly simplify their origins, but I’m in a rush this morning so can share more accurate details later if you wish).

Edit: the GP changed their comment. The original copy didn’t reference NT, it just said “Windows 3.1”. Hence my reply.

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

amusingly Motif and CDE were derived from HP attempts to copy Windows 2.x and the betas of Windows 3.0

not windows 3.1 -- windows 3.1 was popular! Windows before 3.1 was distinctly unpopular. It had basically no installed base. The only Windows 2.x applications I know of actually shipped an embedded Windows copy on the floppy disk.

HP was carefully tracking all the much less popular stuff Microsoft was doing in the late 80s because they thought this "WIMP" paradigm had staying powers, even if Microsoft was not exactly selling a lot of units

Comment by tombert 15 hours ago

Even if the GUI design elements originated with Windows, I don’t think it’s incompetent to mention Windows NT when VMS comes up. Due to Cutler’s origins, a lot of people consider NT as the spiritual successor to VAX.

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

spiritual successor? how about "ghoulish horror" ;)

the worst example of "second system effect" i have ever heard of

Comment by tombert 5 hours ago

To be fair, I actually think that the NT kernel is fine, and arguably better than Linux. It’s the rest of Windows that is terrible.

Comment by hnlmorg 15 hours ago

Fair point.

Comment by hackyhacky 17 hours ago

Anyone here going to the VMS bootcamp? [1]

[1] https://events.vmssoftware.com/bootcamp-malmo-2026

Comment by dcminter 14 hours ago

I'm rather tempted. I'm funemployed at the moment and live over in Stockholm so it's just a (long) train journey away. I used to enjoy messing around on Vaxen in my college days.

I can't see myself ever using VMS professionally though, and it has a somewhat vague description of the actual content. It's not super expensive but I'd have to fork out for the travel and accommodation.

I'd love to hear about it if anyone does a write-up after the fact.

Comment by tombert 16 hours ago

I used to work for a convention planning company, so I shouldn't be surprised, but I somehow am surprised that there are enough VMS users to justify a conference. I have genuinely not heard of anyone using VMS in any context in more than twenty years.

Comment by chasil 16 hours ago

Red Hat recently removed Motif from their distribution. I wonder if it's still in AIX.

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6113101

Comment by Tor3 15 hours ago

"I wonder if it's still in AIX."

  lslpp -l|grep -i motif
  X11.adt.motif             7.1.5.31  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Application
                                                 Development   Toolkit Motif
  X11.compat.lib.X11R6_motif
                            7.1.5.31  COMMITTED  AIXwindows X11R6 Motif 1.2 &
  X11.motif.lib             7.1.5.31  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Motif Libraries
  X11.motif.mwm              7.1.1.0  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Motif Window
  X11.msg.en_US.motif.lib    7.1.3.0  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Motif Lib. Msgs -
  X11.msg.en_US.motif.mwm    7.1.3.0  COMMITTED  AIX Motif Window Mgr Msgs -

  oslevel -r
 7100-03

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

I think aix still ships CDE, too

which would be unremarkable except none of the UNIX vendors has produced a new build in like 30 years

so if they are still shipping CDE it is probably 32 bit binaries from AIX 4 or AIX 5L

Comment by hapless 14 hours ago

"deprecated" is not "removed"

it can take literally decades for a deprecated package to actually get removed, because customers get mad

Comment by chasil 6 hours ago

I think it is removed from rhel10. I can check if you want.

The entire 32-bit subsystem (multilib) is also removed from rhel10.

Comment by jmclnx 9 hours ago

It is as of 2 years ago, the last time I had access to AIX. many proprietary applications on AIX used Motif Libs.

Comment by BSDobelix 13 hours ago

Dual booting OpenVMS (not virtualization) would be a really cool thing.

Comment by ch_123 13 hours ago

Some folks have had success running it on certain server hardware (Usually HPE Proliant). There are no graphics drivers for x86, so it is X forwarding only.