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I am looking for a simple C++ library for making GUIs. I tried wxWidgets and GTK, but I think both are complex.
I want your opinion on what to use. Should I learn wxWidgets or you know a better one?
Thanks.
Try Nokia's QT. It's free, awesome and cross platform.
If you only need to support Windows, then you can check MFC or even better IMHO Windows Forms (with Managed C++).
Try Qt, it's the best library out there. Even works cross platform.
You used to have to pay for a licence but they recently changed their licence to the LGPL.
Any GUI toolkit is going to be complex -- GUIs are hard. I've heard good things about QT; I'd suggest GTK (not as complex as it looks) but it's a pain to install on Windows. I've done some work with wxPython, but I wouldn't know about Wx for C++.
you can check MFC and QT
Try out :)
FLTK The Fast Light Toolkit is a cross-platform Graphical User Interface (GUI) written in C++ library and can be use on UNIX/Linux, Microsoft Windows
On Windows you may try WTL instead of MFC. It is more lightweight, works slighly faster then MFC and it is open source (it is used, e.g. in Google Chrome for Windows). As a bad side, it has little documentation.
You can use Visual C++ Express edition with MFC and the new library (from BCGSoft) to create office like GUI. It's powerful and there is a lot of documentation and support on community sites:
http://www.codeproject.com
http://www.codeguru.com.
If you are new in programming, I think you start directly with C# and .net, WinForms offer more tools and its simple to start. and with the mono you can deploy on other platforms as mac OS or LINUX.
To start download the Visual C# Express Edition, it's free.
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I am looking to build a very simple GUI for a C++ application. Fancyness, design and advanced features don't matter. What is important however, is that I can write automated tests against it, programmatically checking content of fields and clicking buttons. It also needs to run at least on Linux and Windows, preferably also Mac. Any suggestions?
Edit:Open Source tools are highly preferred.
Sorry I am a bit late in answering.
Well there are many options in GUI programming. However, since you say you want something simple without flairs and eye-candy, the choice narrows down a little. Here are my suggestions:
QT
Pretty awesome. Don't want to sound like a Nokia (or Trolltech) evangelist, but this framework has it all. Mature API, Good design, Platform independence, Flexibility you name it! However, simplicity? Well... that's not a strong point, in fact, QT is the exact opposite. It tends to be more on the extremely heavy and well-armed side, definitely not simple.
GTK+
Again, pretty cool. Supports less platforms than QT, but has a pretty mature API, works on all the platforms you mentioned, the design is pretty awesome too. Flexibility? Well the new GTK+ 3 is a lot flexible but GTK+ 2 (the current latest supported version for Windows) lacks a bit in this respect. It's simpler than QT however, less eye-candy etc. But it relies on a ton of third-party libraries, which is a bit of a disadvantage for some platforms.
For a comparison between the above two, see one of my previous answers.
FLTK
Frankly, IMHO this is the toolkit that fits your needs the best. It's simple, platform-independent, very easy to deploy and cross-compile and pretty mature (though it's community is not quite as active as GTK+ and QT). It's OpenGL based, and looks pretty much similar on all platforms (I don't know if this is a pro or con in this case ). It's got a pretty lenient license, you can statically link the entire library, no dependencies except OpenGL.
Runs on all platforms supported by OpenGL.
I am looking to build a very simple GUI for a C++ application. Fancyness, design and advanced features don't matter. What is important however, is that I can write automated tests against it, programmatically checking content of fields and clicking buttons. It also needs to run at least on Linux and Windows, preferably also Mac.
Overall, from the requirements you mentioned, I think FLTK is ideal for you. Though you should also take a look at the other two if you aren't satisfied.
Update:
Testing Frameworks:
Unfortunately, I haven't seen any good testing framework for FLTK though. For QT, there is the QTestLib. For GTK there is dogtail.
Suggest that you use Qt as mentioned above. It is mature and there are new features getting added. To test apps written in Qt, you have the following options
QtTestLib
Squish
And some more ideas on QtCentre
Update: Since there is support for Python and Qt in pyqt creating a test-suite using something like pyunit will be a good option
I am not aware of the level of support for other libraries, but good contendors are - wxwindows and GTk
QT http://qt.nokia.com/products/qt-sdk/
Have you looked into Qt library? http://www.qt.io/
You can try fltk it is cross-platform and lightweight. The other choice is qt
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I just want to write a very simple C++ program for Windows only that uses a GUI. What library for C++ is free and allows me to do this? (This code is not, and will never be, open source).
+1 for Qt.
Qt is bloody awesome. Once you've hacked around with QT you will never, ever want to go back to any other UI API. Seriously. It's. That. Good.
There's also a free IDE that you can use that makes development even more painless. Oh, and the community is very helpful and generally kicks ass.
All Hail Qt!
You could use WxWidgets. From the blurb:
Unlike other cross-platform toolkits,
wxWidgets gives its applications a
truly native look and feel because it
uses the platform's native API rather
than emulating the GUI. It's also
extensive, free, open-source and
mature.
GTK+ and for C++ GTKmm I guess.
Maybe but maybe also Qt.
I think you could do that with Qt.
Here you go.
WTL is quite popular. If you visit the SourceForge page you will see praise heaped upon the project.
There are long fights about choosing free and/or portable GUI for c/c++ applications. Each programmer has his own favourite, and only few programmers have tried multiple of them so they can compare. So I suggest you to google some more for various comparations.
From what I hear all the free ones suffer lack of documentation and code updates, but all of them have good user support through forums or IRC channels. Qt has better support/userbase but is not completely free (but I can't provide you with details for that).
I have used Visual Studio MFC before and then when I wanted to have free and portable GUI I choosen GtkMM. I have to say that it was PITA to switch as GtkMM is not documented very well, its functionality is sometimes confusing, I had to recompile and modify few things (like widget with in-dialog OpenGL support) but I was able to finish my program successfuly. On the other hand, starting with MFC wasn't easy too.
But I'm not suggesting GtkMM over other ones. So I just can provide the list: Gtk, GtkMM (Gtk++), Qt, wxWidgets.
There are so many C++ GUI frameworks: Qt, gtkmm, wxWidgets (all these are specified above).
Add FLTK to that list.
If it is only for Windows and you use Visual-Studio you may use WinForms or the more up to date WPF. There is a nice GUI designer in the Visual-Studio and it is free for any purposes.
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We're developing/supporting 2 large MFC applications, using VS 2005. Currently, we are looking at various MFC GUI/controls component libraries:
www.bcgsoft.com : "BCGControlBar Pro"
www.codejock.com : "Toolkit Pro"
www.prof-uis.com : "Prof-UIS"
others?
The samples/demos provided for those look all great, and the feature sets seem to match more or less between those libraries.
Has anyone used/reviewed one/more of those?
How is the learning curve?
Advantages/disadvantages?
Toolkit pro seems to be quite popular, id software and Crytek use it for example for their editors. I looked at the BCG once, and the documentation at least was quite bad; didn't have a chance to actually work with the Toolkit pro stuff, but their trial was looking nice.
You could try Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack available for Visual Studio 2008. It is official part of Visual Studio powered by BCGSoft.
From personal experience: When the need in using Property Grid control have arisen, I've tried BCGSoft solutions, but it was less convenient than using .NET PropertyGrid (through C++/CLI wrapper).
Parts of BCG have been incorporated into MFC in VS2008, so I assume at least Microsoft likes it.
I know one of our products use BCG, and we haven't had any major problems with it. Then again, I rarely work with UI, so I can't really share any first-hand experience.
I used codejock's a couple of years ago. The library was really good, simple to use, good documentation and good, fast support (they even wrote a sample for me to demonstrate what I was asking for.)
I would recommend them, although I have not tried the others you have mentioned.
We're using the new MFC classes from Visual Studio 2008 in a product. Previously we were using BCGControlBar Pro, the conversion to the new MFC classes had to be done by search and replace.
One important thing that BCGControlBar Pro lacks is a resizable layout manager, for this we use a 3rd party codeproject component (which is a pain to use). Codejock has a resizable layout manager.
Another interesting thing that Codejock has is XAML support. Here is their development forum XAML section and (bit dated) XAMLPad like test tool. This would have saved me the time used for creating nice GDI+ gradient buttons (Codejock uses GDI+ for XAML and I had to clone the buttons from a WPF project)
The resizable layout manager and XAML support make "Toolkit Pro" from Codejock a winner in my eyes, even though I haven't used it.
Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack was included in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It's not as powerful as BCGControlBar Pro. And it's not for Visual C++ 2005.
Microsoft will provide better official GUI libraries for its Visual C++ and Visual C# products.
I tried both Prof-UIS freeware and BCGControlBar Pro. Prof-UIS is slower than BCGControlBar Pro, but it's easier to use.
Another vendor:
http://www.prof-uis.com
Prof-UIS is an easy-to-use MFC extension library that enables you to deliver Windows applications with a professional and user-friendly interface. More than 200 thoroughly tested and documented C++ classes,
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I'm looking for a minimal and easy to learn C or C++ cross platform gui library.
In a nutshell I only need the following functionality:
application window
menu bar
some simple dialogs, File-open and save. Maybe a user-written one.
user canvas where I can draw lines an circles on.
some kind of message/event loop mechanism.
Target platforms would be Win32 and linux. MacOS would be nice to have but is not important at the moment.
Why am I looking for something minimal? I don't want to spend much time to learn a big and full blown abstraction system for a really small application. The easier and leaner, the better.
Any suggestions?
If you need something small, try FLTK libs: I used them at work (embedded development) and I think it's a valid option. Maybe apps are not as "cool" as QT-based ones, but developing with FLTK libs is fast and easy.
I don't know about minimal, but Qt is pretty easy to learn.
Its light-weight enough to run on embedded devices, so you be the judge.
EDIT after seeing the comments:
Yes, Qt is a fullblown application framework, but here's my case: an app with cross platform GUI but other platform-dependent code is not really platform independent. I don't think moving existing C++ code into Qt entails any work at all. If anything, this would allow Nils to use his existing C++ code, and only use Qt for a GUI. But of course, I assume that the existing C++ code is portable.
wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with minimal or no code changes. It covers systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux/Unix (X11, Motif, and GTK+), OpenVMS, OS/2 and AmigaOS. A version for embedded systems is under development.
http://www.wxwidgets.org/
See Good C++ GUI library for Windows for relevant answers.
Personally, I would go with Qt, now that it's open. You don't necessarily want a minimal library, you want one that is easy to use, and quality documentation and community support will give you just that.
Small projects have the nasty habit of sticking around and picking up scope -- as things get hairier, you don't want to be stuck with some small library that nobody knows about.
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What is the easiest cross platform widget toolkit? I'm looking for one that minimally covers Windows, OSX, and Linux with a C or C++ interface.
I don't know of any I've personally used with a C API, but wxWidgets is C++. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. And if you're looking for easy, wxPython is a Python wrapper around wxWidgets and it is pretty easy to use.
I really like Qt. Have been working with it in several projects now.
Although the project, I am currently working on, will be released for windows only, some of our developers code under Mac OS X using the gcc. And using different compilers and environments is an extra benefit for locating errors & bugs.
I forgot to mention that Qt has a really good documentation including lots of practical examples that help for a quick start.
I've used both wxWidgets and QT professionally. Both are certainly capable of meeting your goals. Which one is easiest is hard to say. You don't tell us whether you're looking for easy to use, or easy to learn. Qt is easier for big programs. WxWidgets is easier to learn. This for a large part due to the signal/slot mechanism in QT, which is a good but non-intuitive architecture for large applications.
Both libraries are actually so good that I'd recommend them for non-crossplatform programming too.
Are we talking GUI Widgets? If so, I can suggest 3
FLTK:
http://www.fltk.org/
GTK:
http://www.gtk.org/
QT:
http://trolltech.com/products/qt/
As with the other posters, I strongly recommend looking at C++ toolkits. GTK will work on Windows and the Mac OS, but will only give you truly good results on Linux. And even some of the GTK maintainers are inventing their their own object-oriented C dialect to avoid writing GUIs against the native GTK API.
As for C++, it depends on what you want. Ease of development? Native GUIs on every platform? Commercial support?
If you want native-looking GUIs on Win32 and Linux (and something semi-reasonable on the Mac), one excellent choice is wxWidgets. Here's a longer article with real-world wxWidgets experiences. The Mac port has improved substantially since 2002, when that article was written, but it still has some soft spots.
The easiest to write a new program in would be the one you're most familiar with.
The easiest to use, test or distribute would probably be the most cross-platform, most distributed or the most supported one, so GTK+/wx/Qt/Tk?
Note that C itself isn't a particularly easy language, especially with the growing object-oriented approach to GUIs.
The easiest one to cook up a prototype in a scripting language, then convert to a compiled one might be any toolkit with a scripting language binding (pyGTK, wxPython, etc.)
That being said, of the "big" ones, only GTK+ and Tk have a C bindings. wxWidgets, Qt and FLTK were all written in C++ and don't have any C bindings as far as I know.
I suggest you look into learning C++ and then comparing the available options. Coding in C++ might feel like coding in a scripting language with great conveniences such as automatic pointers, utility classes and overloaded operators, non-invasive garbage collectors and easy to inherit parent classes all brought to your fingertips by the language itself and your widget toolkit.
Then my personal suggestion would be wxWidgets; quite easy to use, better documented than GTKmm and "freer" than Qt.