# Customizing the Text Widget

The remainder of this chapter will describe customizing the Text widget. The Text widget may be customized by subclassing, or by creating new sources and sinks. Subclassing is described in detail in Chapter 7; this section will describe only those things that are specific to the Text widget. Attributes of the Text widget base class and creating new sources and sinks will be discussed.

The Text widget is made up of a number of different pieces, with the Text widget as the base widget class. It and the AsciiText widget are the only true "widgets" in the Text widget family. The other pieces (sources and sinks) are X Toolkit objects and have no window associated with them. No source or sink is useful unless assigned to a Text widget.

Each of the following pieces of the Text widget has a specific purpose, and will be, or has been, discussed in detail in this chapter:

`Text`

  This is the glue that binds everything else together. This widget reads the text data from the source, and displays the information in the sink. All translations and actions are handled in the Text widget itself.

`TextSink`

  This object is responsible for displaying and clearing the drawing area. It also reports the configuration of the window that contains the drawing area. The TextSink does not have its own window; instead it does its drawing on the Text widget's window.

`TextSrc`

  This object is responsible for reading, editing and searching through the text buffer.

`AsciiSink`

  This object is a subclass of the TextSink and knows how to display ASCII text. Support has been added to display any 8-bit character set, given the font.

`MultiSink`

  This object is a subclass of the TextSink and knows how to display font sets.

`AsciiSrc`

  This object is a subclass of the TextSrc and knows how to read strings and files.

`MultiSrc`

  This object is a subclass of the TextSrc and knows how to read strings and multibyte files, converting them to wide characters based on locale.

`AsciiText`

  This widget is a subclass of the Text widget. When created, the AsciiText automatically creates and attaches either an AsciiSrc and AsciiSink, or a MultiSrc and MultiSink, to itself. The AsciiText provides the simplest interface to the Athena Text widgets.