7. Using external GUI constructors (XForms fdesign)

This applies to the XForms GUI library only (a similar technique will be necessary for an fltk port)

• Fdesign generated files should not be changed at all. The only changes needed are gettext, or when you have made your own XForms objects and have just a dummy in the .fd file in place of your own. In case you have to change the generated files for any of the reasons above, you should provide a patch against the clean generated file.
• The Fdesign generated files are then gutted and wrapped into a class. The callbacks will need to be static methods of the class but the form struct and instance should be declared privately within the class. The forms u_vdata parameter can be used to hold a pointer to the instance so the static callback methods can activate the appropriate dialog instance.

7.1 Suggestions for Gnome

An entire Gnome frontend could be built in scheme. That would be an interesting experiment and anybody could change and customize it without the need to recompile LyX.