GTK is the widget toolkit which is used by applications to create rich user interfaces on the screen. See {@link org.gnome.gtk.Gtk Gtk} to get started.

## History

GTK was first created by the authors of The GIMP, a powerful graphics manipulation program. They had innovative ideas about the user interface they wanted to provide, but needed to create an entirely new widget toolkit to do so!

The result was GTK (the GIMP widget Tool Kit). Many liked its power, look and feel, and simplicity, and very quickly it became the foundation of the GNOME project and today is used not only for all the applications that make up the GNOME Desktop, but for a huge range of popular programs available for Linux and Unix.

Originally GTK was a self contained library, but as it became the foundation for GNOME it was abstracted into several layers which are reflected in the many packages that are available in java-gnome; if you haven't already, see the overview for details.