Graphics Support

Starting with Generation 4, Xic and all other Whiteley Research products used the GTK-2 graphical user interface toolkit exclusively. This replaced the Win32 graphical interface previously used under Windows and the GTK-1 interface used for other systems. Thus, all releases had precisely the same graphical interface, which greatly simplified documentation, maintenance, and development.

Presently (April 2024) GTK-2 is still the reference toolkit, but it is being replaced by Qt, another popular toolkit. The user interface is very similar, most of the changes are ``under the hood''. The tremendous amount of work to bring in a different toolkit is about complete, and Qt releases are in ``beta'' testing.

The reasons for the change are as follows.

• Starting with GTK-3, a new drawing layer named Cairo was introduced, and the previous drawing layer, which was a vaneer over the X-windows system, was eliminated. The problem was that the new drawing layer was not at all compatible with Xic, or any CAD type of tool requiring rendering precision and high performance. Cairo is geared for PowerPoint-type applications.
• GTK-2 is long-obsolete, and it will likely disappear at some point soon. The current GTK is GTK-4, which is not supported by Xic and probably never will be. Xic can build with GTK-3, but the result has serious flaws and shortcomings, and further development with GTK has stopped.
• GTK is a C library and Xic and WRspice are C++ programs, whereas Qt is also C++. The internal organization of the Qt version of the programs is far nicer and more concise and will be esier to maintain and extend.
• Qt has very good compatibility with Windows and macOS. There is no need to run an X server like XQuartz with the macOS Qt versions.
• Qt is contemporary software under active development, GTK-2 is very old.