Most of the tools for programming in the X Window environment are aimed for programmers who write serious applications, addressed to a large market. Yet, with the exception of the Tk Toolkit by Ousterhout, little attention has been paid to the needs of people who write "throw-away" or limited use programs. Writing such programs is the main activity at a University where students have to be taught to "walk" before they can "run." Limited use programs are also quite common in research laboratories. (Of course the first versions of many "serious" commercial programs are also thrown away.)
In order to teach an undergraduate course in an X window environment and to provide graphical tools for software development in my laboratory I have develop an X Starter toolkit. It includes a library of simple primitive graphics functions (so one can forget about Xlib) and a simple event structure whose so that one can write a "hello world" program in two lines. The library is based on a new widget class, PaperWidgetClass, whose members can be used either as stand-alone or within another widget set, such as OpenLook, Motif, or Tk.
The Starter toolkit is also useful for more serious work, such as widget prototyping. For example, a prototype for a slider widget can be built with about 100 lines of sparse and simple C code.