I want to create my own editor to code in, at first I was going to use ncurses to make a terminal editor. Not working, the library has no documentation and it's mail list is completely empty. I'm probably going to make it with a gui library instead. I'm thinking of just using glut from cl-opengl, but I can't find any info on how developed it is. If it's not in a good usable state I guess I'll just use gtk.
Thanks guys
It's better to use lispbuilder. It's by far more complete than cl-opengl.
But if you want a gui library for lisp you can try wxcl.
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I am using c++ in ubuntu 12.04 using gcc. Am trying to perform few image processing tasks using opencv. For this, I want the user to select an image. Is it possible to open the directory explorer through c++, and let user choose the image, by selecting folders or drives, etc.? I actually did not know how to google this question exactly, my apologies if this is pretty rudimentary. Your help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance
You will want to use a GUI toolkit like Qt. They ususally have some sort of function for what you want. In the case of Qt the QFileDialog would be good.
For learning Qt: There are official tutorials or maybe this question.
If you want to go down this route you can also use a completely separate program just for getting a file name. Something like zenity maybe. Which platform do you want to do this on?
Is it a good idea to use gtkmm gui toolkit for some desktop client application ?
Is this toolkit stable and is there enough documentation online ?
I used gtkmm to write professional applications and yes you can use it for real world software development.
But I also used C/GTK+ and C++/Qt and my opinion is that using Gtkmm you have the feeling that the original toolkit was meant to be used in C and the porting to C++ is ok but in many cases you feel that C++ features could have been used better.
For Comparison:
If you have to choose between Gtk and Gtkmm go for Gtkmm even though you might find yourself stuck in some not well documented or supported function. Eventually you always manage to find a solution (you can check the source code) and c++ is way better then c.
If you have to choose between Gtkmm and Qt, go for Qt. There is a HUGE gap between the two. Not only in the toolkit itself but in the documentation and all the other classes that you need when writing an application.
I started two month ago with gtkmm. I actually port a tcl/tk application and it feels very hard for my to get the things run. The only useful documentation I found is the https://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/3.4/
But many things described in the manual are not working! I actually run into trouble while overriding signal handlers which should work but didn't. Maybe you will take a look in gtkmm-list#gnome.org to find out what kind of problems yo will maybe run in :-)
The docs derived from the doxygen input seems useless for me, because the functions are mostly not described and the parameter names or often not very clear to me.
In comparison to tcl/tk the interface looks inconsistent. Sometimes a parameter must be provided by a text, sometimes by a pointer and sometimes by the native value itself. Especially the menus are very "mysterious" with the string based configuration. The need of having parameters as text is very unhandy! You have to convert the parameter with ostrstream into a text and parse the parameters sometimes yourself from text to real values.
I decided to give gtk+ a chance is the existence of the c++ interface. I thought it would be helpful to get the errors in compile time and not while running the app like with tcl/tk. But this is not the always true with gtkmm. With gtkmm you are also able to run into run time errors because all string parameters will be parsed during run time! This makes the things error prone!
Maybe I will start again and give Qt a chance. But a first view on it shows, that this seems not really better :-)
Writing a gui application still is a really annoying job!
gtkmm is a official supported binding of GTK (gtk.org/language-bindings.php).
"inkscape" and "ardour" are notable applications written in gtkmm
The bindings that are official GNOME Bindings follow the GNOME release schedule which guarantees API stability and time-based releases.
If you want to write your Application in C, go with GTK+ (and the GLib).
You can find a link to the documentation at http://www.gtkmm.org/ (https://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/).
With Glade (and ie. PyGTK) you could rapid prototype your application.
Building a GUI with Glade is easy and the resulting UI is a xml file, that is not bound to a programming language.
I'm working on an application using OpenGL and C++ that parses some structured input from a file and displays it graphically. I'd like to start an Open File dialog when the application loads to allow the user to choose the file they want to have displayed. I haven't been able to find what I need on the web. Is there a way to achieve this in C++? If so, how? Thank you in advance.
You have two choices, a quick one, and a good one:
Quick and pretty simple, use the Navigation Services framework from Carbon and NavCreateGetFileDialog(). You'll be done quick, and you'll have to learn almost nothing new, but your code won't run in 64-bit (which Apple is pushing everyone towards) and you'll have to link the Carbon framework. Navigation Services is officially removed in 64-bit, and is generally deprecated going forward (though I expect it to linger in 32-bit for quite a while).
A little more work the first time you do it (because you need to learn some Objective-C), but much more powerful and fully supported, wrap up NSOpenPanel in an Objective-C++ class and expose that to your C++. This is my Wrapping C++ pattern, just backwards. If you go this way and have trouble, drop a note and I'll try to speed up posting a blog entry on it.
To add to what Rob wrote:
Unfortunately, there's no simple equivalent to Windows's GetOpenFileName.
If you use Carbon: I don't really think NavCreatGetFileDialog is easy to use... you can use this code in the CarbonDev to see how to use it. The code there returns CFURLRef. To get the POSIX path, use CFURLGetFileSystemReprestnation.
That said, I recommend you to use Cocoa. Rob will write a blog post how to use NSOpenPanel from GLUT :)
For my school project, I would like to build a gui that someone else can use to create a gui. Upon some research I saw lot of gui builders but didn't see anything along the lines of what I am looking for.
But then I did find a tutorial using C# on here
I rather create this gui editor for linux environment.
Any suggestions to where I should start? what tools I can use? Any links to any tutorials?
Any help/direction would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. I would like to add that it only needs to be very simple. like few text input fields and some button type fields that user can arrange in the order desired.
I would recommend that you not try to build your own GUI builder. It is a daunting task that you will not be able to accomplish as a school project. C++ is fully-compiled, which means that it lacks almost every feature that enables people to build meta-tools (like GUI editors) for it. This mainly has to do with the fact that C++ does not have runtime reflection (natively, anyway). Beyond that, there is no "one GUI toolkit and/or paradigm to rule them all." This makes your problem incredibly difficult to deal with.
So: I would recommend Qt, because it works on a ton of platforms, is easy to use and is just plain awesome. You could also look at the billions of other GUI toolkits like Gtk+, Tk, FLTK, YAAF, GLUI, dlib, CLX...
I'm aware that this does not actually answer the question. However, I do not think that the author is aware of how incredibly difficult the task he has set in front of himself is.
I would recommend starting by implementing it like an interpreter. Start with a very simple command line tool that takes commands like window(300, 400, "window1") and button(50,100, "button1") etc and output the code (native or whatever other GUI code you want), to a file. The goal should be to output a file that can be run and show the GUI that was designed. Once you have that, build a GUI that uses the command line functions as a back-end.
I don't have any exact links to this, but here's an example of what you could do. Gtk has the option of loading a GUI by using a class called GtkBuilder. Glade (the usual Gtk gui editor) has support for outputting it's result as an XML file that the GtkBuilder class then reads.
It would be possible for your program to output an equivalently formed XML file that GtkBuilder could read.
I have no clue as to how difficult it would be to target that XML though.
You should use GTK+ or Qt if you are targeting the linux environment. I think the first step is to learn how to program gui, which takes some time considering you are writing c/c++ code wich is different from higher level languages. Don't you think learning to code gui programs and writing a gui builder at the same time is a little bit too much.? First you should master the basics about gui and then go on to harder projects.
Here's a link to an excellent book on gtk. (Foundations of gtk+ development - Andrew Krause)
http://books.google.com/books?id=L1BZZYRrqSgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=foundations+krause&hl=es&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
And here's a great tutorial/cookbook for gtk+.
http://zetcode.com/tutorials/gtktutorial/
The official documentation is on library.gnome.org
My final advice is learn one thing at a time.
I am trying to create some charts of data (eg http://www.amibroker.com/). Is there a C++ library that can do this without a lot of extra work? I'm thinking Qt or wxWindows would have something like it, but it wasn't immediately obvious.
Thanks!
FLTK is a light and portable C++ toolkit for GUI. There's a chart class. Sample.
Qwt does at least some of the things you are trying to achieve (basic plots, bar charts and so on), and integrates well with Qt.
I think you need to pick your GUI framework first, then find a charting control for the given framework, since that affects what charting controls you could feasibly use. For example, must this be portable?
For the project I'm working on (a large MFC application) we use Cedric Moonen's ChartCtrl. We've had a pretty good experience with it so far.
I've done some graph plotting with gnuplot lately, which is quite powerful. Although I think it is Linux only, which may or may not be a problem.
Also, believe it or not, some amazing things can be done with LaTeX. I've used the tkz (tikz) library to produce some awesome graphs.
Both solutions plot to a file which you can include in your interface.
They aren't C++ libraries but you can easily create the datafiles and call the necessary programs from within your C++ program (Being creative with system() and possible some shell scripts).