The Widget Palette is the area to the left of the main X-Designer Window. Each item in the Palette represents a standard Motif widget or a user-defined widget which has been added to the palette (see widget definition).
At the top of the Palette are the Shell widgets, which act as various kinds of interface between the current dialog and the window manager.
Underneath the Shells are the Dialog Structures. These are Motif components which are meant to form complete dialogs: File Selection, Prompt, and Message utilities, for example.
The third section of the Palette has the Container (Manager) widgets. These are widgets which impose a layout policy of some kind upon any child widgets. All of the widgets in this section of the Palette support additional children.
Below the container widgets are the Controls (Primitive) widgets. These are widgets which provide the basic building blocks; generally they do not support the addition of user-specified child widgets. There are two exceptions: the Motif 2.1 SpinBox, and the Scale widget.
Below the Controls are the Java Layout components.
Underneath the Java Widgets are any user-defined widgets which have been added to the palette.
In Microsoft Windows mode there are less widgets on the Palette because some of the Motif widgets have no equivalent on Microsoft Windows.
Selecting a widget from the Palette will add a new instance of the widget to your dialog as a child of the currently selected widget. The Shell widget is an exception and causes a whole new dialog to be added to your design.
Greyed out widgets cannot be used as children of the currently selected widget: they are made insensitive so that you cannot create an invalid Motif design.
If you are unsure of the meaning of any of the icons within the Palette, the Palette help option (within the Help Menu at the top right of the X-Designer Window) provides information on each of the items in the Palette.
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Some of the widgets on the Palette are composite widgets: when you add one of these to your dialog design, you will actually add a whole sub-hierarchy. You cannot change the structure of this sub-hierarchy other than to optionally add or delete extra widgets of your own. You can however set resources for any of the widgets in the sub-hierarchy.
See also: