Motif is great, I love how it looks and feels, and I want it to be actively maintained. I want a healthy ecosystem of Motif applications and even window managers and desktop environments, so I can run a real Motif environment. Sadly, while Motif has been open source for a while, the project itself stalled years ago, with little to no activity from anyone involved. That may be changing, as a number of developers decided to take matters into their own hands last year.
This fork of Motif was born of a desire to keep Motif (and other X11 technologies) alive and well. The original upstream Sourceforge project hasn’t had any activity in over two years, none of the project admins have been active for at least that amount of time, the official bug tracker has disappeared into the void; and the user forum was closed way back in 2017. Sadly, it appears that the original upstream has abandoned the project.
I’ve incorporated some fixes from upstream that have laid dormant for years, a few others from Gentoo, and made a few improvements of my own. I intend to maintain this fork, and in doing so advocate for the continued use of the user interface toolkit that defined an era, and influenced many of the user interfaces that came after it.
↫ Tim Hentenaar at the Motif fork’s GitHub page
Some of the people involved are people I know online, so I have a bit of faith in this fork being able to stand the test of time, but of course, managing a complex project like this is hard, so who knows how long the enthusiasm remains. Still, this fork has seen five releases since its inception a little over a year ago, which seems promising. It may seem weird for some to have a love for Motif, but I’m the kind of person who installs weird, outdated corporate and industrial software I don’t understand on my HP c8000 dual PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX just to enjoy the Motif interfaces they sometimes ship. We all have our quirks.
From my experiences talking to people online, I know there’s actually a rather solid number of people like me, and I hope that at some point the developers in this group can gain enough critical mass to build something like a basic Linux distribution or desktop environment using the disparate, actively-maintained Motif projects out there that yes, still exist. It’s a long shot, but in today’s computing landscape, where more and more people feel uncomfortable with “modern” software, I really feel like there’s a niche for something like this to exist.
A really small niche, surely, but a niche all the same.
Emwm is a fork of motif with added features. He also has created a some motif applications such as toolbox, a Irix like laucher, xmsm, a session manager, a file manager and an imageviewer.
Emwm is a window manager, not a toolkit. Emwm uses Motif. It’s in the name: “Enhanced Motif Window Manager”.
It’s one of the pieces of maintained Motif software I was referring to in the article.
“Sadly, it appears that the original upstream has abandoned the project.” Absolutely false. As someone who helps with both Motif and CDE, it is not abandoned. The problem is no one has submitted any pull requests to the project in years an there is all of three developers. This project should send us their patches.
“The problem is no one has submitted any pull requests to the project in years” I just checked the repository on SourceForge and there’s 11 open PRs…?
I have no problem with Motif surviving and being maintained. It’s too jarring for me to go back to. It wasn’t great to look at when I started using ‘nix 30 years ago. It is 90’s ‘nix, that’s certain. NsCDE is as much as I can handle in that direction, emulating Motif by theming.
“I hope that at some point the developers in this group can gain enough critical mass to build something like a basic Linux distribution or desktop environment using the disparate, actively-maintained Motif projects out there….”
I’d pay real money for such a distribution. I love CDE, for example, but something already nicely put together with Motif-using tools ready to go would be magnificent.
Motif and CDE are great. They don’t LOOK great, but they are great.
– clearly defined clickable surfaces (including title bars)
– clearly defined button state
– clear difference between checkboxes and radio switches, with clear state and clear click target surface.
– some applications support detachable menus, and that is great
– I enjoy applications that allow me to float toolboxes around across monitors (old GIMP and old Photoshop, for example).
– clear difference between text input fields and read-only text
– always-visible, big target scrollbars.
– always-visible, easy to reach window borders (easy to resize)
A lot of these elements are present in Windows 95 but Microsoft had already started diluting them around Windows 2000 (the toolbar being the first one to start to suffer).
And a hat tip to a fellow c8000 lover.
I must be one of the very few people who like the Motif look in CDE. Maybe just because I used it for so long with Solaris? Not sure, but I would prefer it over just about any mainstream Linux or UNIX-based UI kit used today.
Ugh, I don’t understand anyone investing their time and effort on a dead horse like Motif.
Familiarity reduces cognitive friction, and nostalgia can make archaic interfaces feel more intuitive than they really are/were.
But Motif is not just awful to look at. It is a notoriously bad/cumbersome programming toolkit on top of Xt Intrinsics. It is ridiculously verbose and callback heavy. Too many bad design decisions to list! So many things that we now take for grated required several layers of framework machinery and indirect configurations on Motif.
There is a reason Motif and several early X toolkits have long been used as examples of how NOT to design GUI frameworks.
Alas, I assume there are people who dig it for some bizarre reason.
At the time of its invention, it was actually a breath of fresh air, a standardized toolkit that was (at the time) much simpler than anything else. Compared to now, its clunky, but back then, it was awesome. You can use Xresources to make it look pretty nice, if you want, but the two easiest are:
*enableThinThickness: True
*enableEtchedInMenu: True
These get rid of the the real clunky looking raised UI widgets.
@Xanady,
I can agree w/ most what you say and I never understand people painting the past in rosy tint.
However, open a large Spreadsheet in LibreOffice w/ GTK4 on a very large screen and try to scroll down using only the mouse pointer and the vertical scrollbar (which is maybe 2mm thick when you get lucky) — it is an usability nightmare. @Shiunbird is right: from a user’s perspective, MOTIF/CDE/GTK2 were easy to understand and to use.
Andreas Reichel,
The way an application looks is very subjective, people have their own preferences, however many modern UI designers seem to completely disregard usability. This is problematic. Scrollbars that are difficult to use even when you know how they work. Non-discoverable UIs, and controls that lack visual cues…these throw away usability in favor of minimalism and it seems like we went through a period when everyone tried to outdo each other in this regard. Again visual preferences are one thing, but objectively usability and consistency did get quite a lot worse along the way. I especially hate having such high density screens, tons of unused white-space, and still designers feel the need to make controls that are so small they’re difficult to use…I was traveling and forced to use android a lot more than usual. The copy/paste mechanics are flawed both in terms of activating at the wrong time and not activating when you need it too. Things like this could be forgiven in early products, but as technology matures I find it very disappointing that usability hasn’t been a focus with longstanding issues getting ignored.
My dad for one has embraced voice interaction, which is more efficient mode of operation compared to touch screen entry. That is one way to mitigate poor touchscreen UIs but obviously disruptive to everyone else around.
I have a soft spot for Motif for purely historical reasons but, as a developer, I cannot imagine wanting to choose it as my GUI toolkit in 2026. That said, if you create a great app in Motif, people will be able to use it. Xwayland is a thing.
CDE as a desktop is in a lot more trouble though as running X as your GUI is going to block access to Wayland only applications in the future. There are Wayland applications now but not many. I have run into the Foot terminal emulator. And anything built with the Iced or Cosmoe libraries is Wayland only. Not much impact yet. But as soon as a Wayland only GUI toolkit becomes popular this will become a bigger problem. GTK5 may be the first.