gtk:init ()

Initializes GTK. This function must be called before using any other GTK functions in your GUI applications. It will initialize everything needed to operate the toolkit. In particular, it will open the default display, see the gdk:display-default function.

If you are using the gtk:application class, you do not have to call this function. The "startup" handler does it for you. Though, if you are using g:application methods that will be invoked before "startup", such as the local_command_line() virtual function, you may need to initialize GTK explicitly.

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 the gtk:init-check function instead.

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 the gtk:init call, but notice that other libraries, for example, libdbus or gvfs, might do similar things.