Penguin
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The Gimp ToolKit was written as the foundation to carry TheGimp?. At the time, the only alternatives were Motif, which has a very restrictive license, and Qt, which wasn't completely FreeSoftware either and is specifically targetted at C++. These were both deemed unacceptable for the reasons given, so a new ToolKit was created and released under the LGPL. It is nowadays known as just GTK and has become a familiar sight (see some screenshots).

gtk-logo-rgb.gif

It's the ToolKit of choice for most any serious application on Linux, such as Mozilla, OpenOffice, and XimianEvolution to name but a few obvious examples. Entire DesktopEnvironments like GNOME and XFce are built on top of it. While it's written in C, it has bindings to many other languages. C++ was the first to get such a library, called gtkmm (for gtk--). There's also PyGTK for Python and Gtk2-Perl for Perl. The 2.x series of GTK is fully internationalized using Pango and supports accessibility through the ATK libraries.

Even a Windows port exists (see some screenshots). Another version called Cursed GTK now in development uses Curses instead of X11, which allows GUI applications to run on the console. The screenshots are rather reminiscent of Borland's !TurboVision? IDE for DOS...