LifeLines X Interface

LifeLines is a genealogical software program for UNIX and related systems written by Tom Wetmore . It handles GEDCOM files with ease and has an excellent report generation language.

However, the LifeLines interface is limited to text entries in a curses-based display. I always felt that while the program functionality was great, the user interface could really benefit from an X Windows implementation. Since I wanted to learn more about 1) genealogical software, and 2) GUI programming, I decided to write a GUI front end to LifeLines as a learning experience.

My goals in writing XLifeLifes is to:

Make a spiffy-cool X interface.

Update and ANSI-fy the existing LifeLines code.

Learn more about genealogical software.

Screen Shots

Here is a simple "first cut" at the interface, just to give you an idea of what I'm trying to do. The test code which produced this image is available here .

The X Windows interface is being developed using the GTK Widgets running under Red Hat Linux . The main developers page is at SourceForge .

Warning: this code does *not* interface in any way to the LifeLines program. It is simply a dumb stand-alone program used to prototype the eventual XLifeLines window layout. This is a pic of what the main sceen will look like. I use notebook tabs to seperate pages of different data with the main page displaying the most common information on the individual.

Here is a snapshot of a simple file selection widget that is provided in GTK+.

Finally, here is another shot of a simple text editing widget that will be used for general data entry (personal notes and such). Specific data for the individual will probably eventually have more of a forms based interface (to be implemented) but the first cut will probably just have the user adding text to a gedcom interface the way it does now under curses.

Sources