Gtkinit

Call this function before using any other GTK+ functions in your GUI applications. It will initialize everything needed to operate the toolkit and parses some standard command line options.

Although you are expected to pass the argc, argv parameters from main() to this function, it is possible to pass NULL if argv is not available or commandline handling is not required.

argc and argv are adjusted accordingly so your own code will never see those standard arguments.

Note that there are some alternative ways to initialize GTK+: if you are calling gtk_parse_args(), gtk_init_check(), gtk_init_with_args() or g_option_context_parse() with the option group returned by gtk_get_option_group(), you don’t have to call gtk_init().

And if you are using GtkApplication, you don’t have to call any of the initialization functions either; the GtkApplication::startup handler does it for you.

This function will terminate your program if it was unable to initialize the windowing system for some reason. If you want your program to fall back to a textual interface you want to call gtk_init_check() instead.

Since 2.18, GTK+ calls signal (SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN) during initialization, to ignore SIGPIPE signals, since these are almost never wanted in graphical applications. If you do need to handle SIGPIPE for some reason, reset the handler after gtk_init(), but notice that other libraries (e.g. libdbus or gvfs) might do similar things.