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X!Family is an editor for Genealogy (Family Tree) Databases working directly with the internationally standardised GEDCOM file format. It has an intuitive visual interface using which details of families, people and events can be browsed and edited directly on a graphical view of the family tree. It was inspired by Dennis Howes' !Family, a BASIC program for RISC OS computers which is great to use, but getting very slow on old machines with a big database.
X!Family is written in C++ using the FLTK toolkit. Using a compiled language makes it much faster than an interpreted one, and the toolkit chosen promises portability to the Wintel platform eventually. The current version runs on Linux and has been tested using both of the popular Desktops, KDE 3 and Gnome. X!Family is released under the GNU General Public License. FLTK is released under the GNU Library Public License, and its source and headers need not be obtained unless you intend to compile X!Family yourself. See Appendix C for details on obtaining the latest versions of X!Family and FLTK, compiling, porting and installing.
At present, X!Family is in early development, but is already useful. Much of the user-interface is already visible, though a lot of it does nothing and as yet, it deals with GEDCOM files "Read-only", so there is no danger of the program corrupting your valuable database. It is already a versatile browser for existing databases, and through its cut-and-paste features, you can export notes to your favourite text editor. It supports multiple views of different parts of the same tree, and allows the event details and notes for multiple people to be viewed simultaneously.
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