Motif (software)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface (GUI) specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The Motif look and feel is distinguished by its use of rudimentary square and chiseled three-dimensional effects for its various user interface elements. Motif is the toolkit for the Common Desktop Environment and IRIX Interactive Desktop, thus it was the standard widget toolkit for Unix. Closely related to Motif is the Motif Window Manager (MWM). After many years as proprietary software, Motif was released in 2012, as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL-2.1-or-later). Motif was created by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to be a standard graphical user interface for Unix platforms. Rather than create a new interface from scratch, OSF opened a Request For Technology (RFT) in 1988 to solicit existing technologies from third parties. OSF intended to either adopt an existing interface wholesale, or create one using technologies from multiple existing products. Forty products were submitted, from which OSF selected twenty-three finalists. Among the finalists were Adobe Inc.'s Display Postscript, Sun Microsystems' OPEN LOOK, Digital Research's GEM, IXI Limited's X.desktop, Apollo Computer's Open Dialogue, Carnegie Mellon University's Andrew User Interface System, Digital Equipment Corporation's XUI, and Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft's CXI and PM/X. Ultimately, OSF selected HP and Microsoft's CXI and DEC's XUI, using the look and feel, window manager and Common User Access compliance from CXI, along with the widget toolkit API and User Interface Language (UIL) from XUI. Motif was first shipped by OSF in 1989. Motif is the basic building block of the Common Desktop Environment, which was the standard desktop for commercial Unix. The IEEE 1295 standard (now withdrawn) defines the "Motif API". As of version 2.1, Motif supports Unicode, which made it widely used in several multilingual environments.