Content from 2015-06

After all the trouble I went through with trying to get an image viewer to work in CL (due to the used GTK+ 3 library being problematic, that is, unmaintained) maybe a different approach is more viable. It would be possible to use one existing program as a front end by calling it via IPC. So e.g. feh, my go-to program for that task, already has configurable keybindings; it should be a smaller problem to remote control it (even with adding some code).

However, as with all these *nix combinators, it feels like a mish-mash of tools intertwined and not-quite the optimal solution.

Consider what happens if you want to add new functionality, i.e. new widgets. In that case composability breaks down since feh is relatively minimal and therefore doesn't have much options in terms of providing different menus, input widgets, etc. Therefore you'd have to find either a different viewer with more scripting capabilities (which is counter to the "one-tool" mantra), or switch to a more integrated approach to have this component as an internal part of your environment.

Obviously now would be the time for either components/CORBA, or a Lisp Machine to hack up other programs.

Or switch to Qt. It seems that the bindings for that framework are more stable than the GTK bindings and additionally they (Qt) just have more people working on the framework.

Since one of the problems with the GTK bindings is the relatively recent upgrade to GTK+ 3, there seems to be a point in using the previous version 2 instead, considering that even GIMP didn't update yet.