Introduction

cells-gtk is a complete, portable framework for Common Lisp GUI development via GTK+2 with Cells Inside^_TM, licensed under the Lisp LGPL

GTK+ is the premier cross-platform GUI development environment, so popular that, well, see also lambda-gtk and lgtk for a other projects making GTK+ available to Lispniks.
Cells transparently link GUI elements with each other and the application model to greatly simplify development of rich interfaces. Cells also automate how Lisp GUI instances drive their GTK+ counterparts.
Common Lisp is coming on as the language of choice for any self-respecting geek. CL is mature, compiled, object-oriented, reflective, multi-paradigm, dynamic, and who do you think invented garbage collection?

cells-gtk was originally developed by Vasilis Margioulas for CLisp, and is now available with CFFI bindings for greater portability. Vasilis included an astonishing array of examples in his initial release, just some of which can be seen in the screenshots graciously provide by Klaus Wiedner.

cell-gtk has been tested under Allegro(Windows), Lispworks(Linux, PC), CLISP(Linux, PC), SBCL(Linux), and CMUCL(Linux).

News

2007-05-14 A libcellsgtk.so for Solaris from Joubert Nel. (Rename it to libcellsgtk.so).
2006-06-30 New tarballs. See below.
2006-06-07
- Patches from Andras Simon allow Cells-GTK to load without complaints under SBCL. (Tested under SBCL 0.9.12).
- The patch also allows libcellsgtk.so to be located wherever it was built, rather than having to copy it to /usr/lib, etc.
- A version of Cells (What was called "Cells 2" at some point) was added to CVS. Having our own copy should help keep things stable as Cells evolves.
2006-06-01 Patches from Marco Gidde make Cells-GTK work better under SBCL. These patches were applied to the CVS repository, but are not in any snapshot yet. See the repository versions of gtk-ffi/gtk-utilities.lisp pod-utils/utils.lisp and gtk-ffi/gtk-ffi.lisp for the fixes, or read the mail from Marco. It includes the patches.
2006-02-16 Native CFFI now used in most of the code. There is a snapshot release.
2006-01-03 BIG NEWS! cells-gtk now runs under CLISP and uses CFFI, not Hello-c for its foreign function interface. The 2006-01-03 tarball reflects these changes. Especial thanks to Novikov Leonid, who did the CLISP port to get things started. The new code has been lightly tested with:
- Lispworks 4.5 Pro/Linux
- CLISP/Linux
- CMUCL/Linux
- ACL 8.0 Beta/Linux (without libcellsgtk)
- SBCL 0.9.7.5/Linux/x86, but see the note in the cells-gtk-devel archive for January 2006.
If I didn't break anything, it also works with CLISP/Win32 and Lispworks/Win32.
2005-11-15 We now provide the win32 .dll and linux .so for libcellsgtk. They are: this for linux and this for win32. This is sort of experimental. If you have problems (e.g. with version mismatch) drop the mailing list a note.
2005-10-08 Some additional discussion in the FAQ. Some work to implement DrawingArea is underway in CVS HEAD. HEAD *should* be OK. New tarballs will be created when it is complete.
2005-05-29 Allows hierarchical arrangement of items in ComboBox. (requires libcellsgtk)
2005-03-03 textview now has capabilities for programmatic manipulation and markup of the text.
2005-02-28 libcellsgtk introduced to enable some capabilities otherwise not available through the FFI.

Download

Tarballs: We intend to provide self-contained tarballs that are snapshots of the CVS repository, and contain all the ancillary modules (cells, cffi, etc). Here are a few:
- cells-gtk-2006-06-30.tgz and cells-gtk-2006-06-30.zip
  - Uses 2006-06-26 version of CFFI.
  - Cleaner load with sbcl. (Thanks, Andras Simon.)
  - Tested with LINUX: LW/Pro, sbcl, clisp; WIN32: clisp.
  - There is a minor problem with cmucl. The fix: edit %load-foreign-library in cffi/cffi-cmucl.lisp to return non-nil. That is, Make it look like this:
```
(defun %load-foreign-library (name)
  "Load the foreign library NAME."
  (sys::load-object-file name)
  t) 
```
  - I (Peter Denno) had problems with LW/Win32. But others seem ok. -- If this form:
    (fli:register-module "libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll" :connection-style :immediate)
    -- returns OK (once you've installed GTK libs) then you should be OK.
- cells-gtk-2006-02-16.tgz
  - Native CFFI. That is, not Hello-C to UFFI, to CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT (yuk!).
  - More testing, testing of CLISP/Windows 2000
- cells-gtk-2006-01-03.tgz
  - Uses CFFI, not Hello-C (See "News" above).
  - Runs under CLISP, Lispworks, CMUCL, SBCL, ACL and maybe others.
  - Checks whether pages of a Notebook are already displayed.
  - Provides a Makefile for libcellsgtk for Windows.
  - Provides more control over divider position in Pane widget.
  - Drawing widget implementation started.
  - Lots of minor stuff.
  - NOTE: This has only been tested with the lisps listed in the "News" above. If it works elsewhere drop the mailing list a note.
- cells-gtk-2005-05-29.tgz
  - ComboBoxes may now use a TreeModel; allows hierarchical arrangement of items. (requires libcellsgtk)
  - Uses Cells 2
  - :expand-all on TreeView allows Tree to initially display completely expanded.
  - New procedure to locate dynamic libraries. (Works 'out of the box' 50% of the time versus 10% before ???)
  - Has not been tested on Windows. Drop the group a note if you try it.
- cells-gtk-2005-02-26.tgz
CVS: Of course, you can get the freshest code from CVS but it might be a little less stable. Information on checking out code from the common-lisp.net repository can be found at http://common-lisp.net/faq.shtml
Original CLISP Code: Now that CLISP is back in the main tree, this isn't the place to start but just in case we screwed something up and you want to have a look, it's here via CVS or the "Download tarball" link at the bottom of that page. Follow instructions in the include INSTALL.TXT.

Mailing List

We have a project mailing list where questions are always welcome.

Peter Denno

Last modified: 2007-02-19