gtkmm is an open source, free, simple and portable command-line software implemented in C++ and designed from the offset to act as an interface to the GTK+ GUI toolkit library, as part of the GNOME desktop environment.
Features at a glance
Among gtkmm’s highlights, we can mention type-safe callbacks, as well as a complex set of widgets that are extensible via inheritance. It features type-safe signal handlers, full internationalisation with UTF8, complete C++ memory management (object composition and automatic deallocation of dynamically allocated widgets), full use of C++ namespaces, and no macros.
Getting started with gtkmm
The easiest way to install the gtkmm project on your GNU/Linux system is via the default package manager/software repositories of your distribution. If the package is not available on the main software repos of your distro, you can download the source tarball from Softpedia.
To install gtkmm, save the tar archive on a location of your choice, unpack its contents, open a terminal emulator, navigate to the location of the extracted archive file using the ‘cd’ command, and execute the ‘./configure && make’ command to optimize and compile the source code.
Then, you must run the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo to deploy the gtkmm program system wide, making it available to all users. Various demos are provides to GTK developers in the /demos folder inside the sources folder.
Supported operating systems
gtkmm is a platform-independent project that supports GNU/Linux (compiles with GCC), NetBSD (compiles with GCC), FreeBSD (compiles with GCC), Solaris (compiles with GCC or Forte), Microsoft Windows (compiles with GCC or MSVC++ .Net 2003/2005/2008) and Mac OS X (compiles with GCC) operating systems. Both 32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures are supported at this time. It is written entirely in the C++ programming language.
