ABSTRACT
In the traditional WIMP-style GUI, the user executes commands by selecting items from a menu. In GUI terminology, such a command is known as an action. A GUI may provide more than one control for executing a particular action. Menu bars and toolbars are the two most common widgets for organizing application-wide actions. An application also needs to report its status in an unobtrusive way. Thus, a typical application window contains, from top to bottom, a menu bar, a toolbar, a large application-specific region, and a status bar. In this chapter, we will introduce actions, menus, toolbars and status bars and conclude by explaining the mechanisms in GTK+ for conveniently defining and managing actions and associated widgets in a large application.
