Hbox

HBox, short for horizontal box, is a container used in graphical user interfaces to arrange child elements in a horizontal row. It is a concept found in several widget toolkits, with varying APIs and behaviors across frameworks.

In GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit), HBox was a dedicated container that laid out its children from left to right, with properties such as spacing (the gap between children) and homogeneous (equal-width children). Beginning with GTK+ 3, HBox and VBox were superseded by GtkBox with an orientation property. The HBox/VBox classes were deprecated and ultimately removed in GTK+ 4 in favor of a single oriented box container.

In JavaFX, HBox is a distinct class (javafx.scene.layout.HBox) that provides a horizontal layout container for nodes. It offers configuration options such as spacing, alignment, and padding, and is commonly used to arrange controls and other elements in a single row.

Other toolkits implement the same concept under different names. For example, Qt provides QHBoxLayout, which serves as a horizontal layout manager, while Android uses a horizontal LinearLayout to achieve a similar result. Although the exact class names differ, the horizontal box pattern remains a standard means of composing user interfaces with side-by-side components.

Overall, HBox denotes a horizontal layout container used to organize child widgets or nodes in a single row. Its exact implementation and availability depend on the toolkit, with GTK evolving toward a unified oriented box approach, while JavaFX and Qt continue to offer explicit horizontal layout classes.