Usage

This is not a magic library which will beautify all your apps instantly. But with some .Xdefaults fiddling you can make Athena applications look, and sometimes behave, much better.

You can make Athena based applications use it by the following ways:

Just replace libXaw.* or libXaw3d.* with libneXtaw.so.?.? and make all symlinks that were pointing to libXaw point to libneXtaw
===> Note that this may not work in some cases. <===
Relink the applications changing -lXaw to -lneXtaw (preferable, but not ever feasible). So you can still have the old libXaw and use it with some app that doesn't work with neXtaw.
On Linux and Solaris, run the application with LD_PRELOAD set, like this:
```
        LD_PRELOAD=/usr/X11R6/lib/libneXtaw.so <program>
```

Whether it can be used as a drop-in replacement or not depends on the application. If it contains widgets that are subclassed from Xaw widgets, it probably won't work and relinking will be necessary - that is the case for any Xaw replacement library.

Previous versions of Siag Office, for example, contained a Handle widget that was subclassed from a Label widget, which meant that widget libraries were not interchangeable. That dependency has since been removed.

Why another Xaw?

The default Athena library is not very pretty and has some rather unintuitive GUI "features". For example you can never tell if that little square with something written in it is meant to be a command button, a checkbox, a radiobutton, a text entry or a label. The 3D replacement (Xaw3d) makes some widgets prettier, but the ambiguity and some other problems are still there.

neXtaw makes widgets even prettier, not only the ones converted by Xaw3d, but now, nearly all other widgets (text, menubutton...) have a neat, clean and elegant-looking N*XTSTEP style. Plus it adds new user configurable resources, so that you can make radiobuttons, checkbuttons and menubuttons have distinctive appearances.