How can I detect if the user "prefers" Qt or GTK?

Question

It sounds impossible, but I want to try.
I'm thinking that a start might be reading the root window atoms in addition to the process list, but I'm not too sure what else.
This goes beyond "the user's running {KDE,GNOME}"; I don't really want to figure out the windowmanager, I want to use deduction so as to figure out what toolkit the user would prefer something to use. The idea is then to compile both Qt and GTK toolkit calls into whatever given program along with a simple abstraction layer and the detection stuff, so I can from there figure out which toolkit to use at startup.
I don't expect perfect detection, but it'd be fun to figure out.
Ideas, anyone?
My first stab at detecting a "GTK preference" is checking if the user is running gnome-session-manager. I'm not too sure what processes set "KDE session" apart from "a Qt-based program is running" because Qt has this tendancy to load 3874692725 things when anything starts and leave them preloaded for the next app. Nice idea, but not for low-RAM machines like mine. Only reason I haven't ravaged bits of KDE and stuffed them into my openbox desktop configuration
-dav7
Last edited by dav7 (2008-10-29 17:46:03)

Answer 1

How about a environmental variable?
You could have something like this is your .bashrc
export MYTOOLKIT=qt
or
export MYTOOLKIT=gtk
Then in your c-program you do something like this:
char *toolkit;
if ((toolkit = getenv("MYTOOLKIT")) == NULL) {
  fprintf(stderr, "-- 'MYTOOLKIT' not defined - required for this application (argv[0])\n");
  exit(1);
if (!strcasecmp(toolkit, "qt")) {
; // qt-part
} else if (!strcasecmp(toolkit, "gtk")) {
; // gtk-part
edit: forgot a curly brace - duh!
Last edited by perbh (2009-01-05 05:24:47)