The Windows port of GTK is an implementation of GDK (and therefore GTK) on top of the Win32 API. When compiling GTK on Windows, this backend is the default.

More information about GTK on Windows, including detailed build instructions, binary downloads, etc, can be found online.

Windows-specific environment variables

The Win32 GDK backend can be influenced with some additional environment variables.

GDK_WIN32_TABLET_INPUT_API

If this variable is set, it determines the API that GTK uses for tablet support. The possible values are:

none

Disables tablet support

wintab

Use the Wintab API

winpointer

Use the Windows Pointer Input Stack API. This is the default.

Windows-specific handling of cursors

By default the “system” cursor theme is used. This makes GTK prefer cursors that Windows currently uses, falling back to Adwaita cursors and (as the last resort) built-in X cursors.

When any other cursor theme is used, GTK will prefer cursors from that theme, falling back to Windows cursors and built-in X cursors.

Theme can be changed by setting gtk-cursor-theme-name GTK setting. Users can override GTK settings in the settings.ini file or at runtime in the GTK Inspector.

Themes are loaded from normal Windows variants of the XDG locations: HOME`%/icons/THEME/cursors`,APPDATA%/icons/THEME/cursors, RUNTIME_PREFIX/share/icons/THEME/cursors

The gtk-cursor-theme-size setting is ignored, GTK will use the cursor size that Windows tells it to use.