Motif (widget toolkit)

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Screenshot of an application that uses the Open Motif toolkit

Motif is a widget toolkit for building graphical user interfaces under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a competitor to the OPEN LOOK GUI.

It is also an industry standard by the name IEEE 1295 (as the Motif API). It is the basic building block of the Common Desktop Environment. As of version 2.1 Motif supports Unicode, which has made it widely used in several multilingual environments.

Motif is distinguished by its use of square, chiseled, three dimensional effects for the various user interface elements — menus, buttons, sliders, text boxes, and the like, which was in vogue for that era. Motif's operation was designed to correspond closely with the then-familiar Microsoft Windows 3.11 and Presentation Manager interfaces, and Microsoft played a key role in designing the original style guide.[1]

Motif was created by the Open Software Foundation (and was sometimes even called OSF/Motif), which has now been subsumed by The Open Group.

There are a few implementations of the Motif API. Motif the toolkit is the first. There is also Open Motif which is a release of the "original" Motif under more liberal licensing terms. Finally, the LessTif project has been working hard to implement the API under the LGPL license.