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I want to create GUI applications with C++ on Windows. I have downloaded Qt, and it works well, but it has so much stuff in it and so many header files that I really don't use. It is a nice framework, but it has more than just GUI.
Are there any lighter GUI libraries out there for Windows C++ that is "just GUI"?
FLTK, if you are serious about lightweight.
http://www.fltk.org/
edit:
Blurb from the website:
FLTK is designed to be small and modular enough to be statically linked, but works fine as a shared library. FLTK also includes an excellent UI builder called FLUID that can be used to create applications in minutes.
I'll add that its mature and stable, too.
Even if wxWidgets is named here already:
wxWidgets!
Its a great and valuable Framwork (API, Class Library, whatever you may call it).
BUT: You can divide the functionality of this library into many small parts (base, core, gui, internet, xml) and use them, when necessary.
If you really want to make GOOD GUI applications, you have to use a GOOD API. wxWidgets is absolutly free (QT is not), only needs a small overhead in binary form, linked as dll or o-file is it about 2Megs, but has to offer all that you ever need to program great applications...
And wxWidgets is much more lighter than QT... and even better... :)
Try it...
JUCE is fairly light weight, it can be as simple as one .cpp & one .h file. (Look at amalgamated JUCE) It doesn't look like a standard windows app however. On the other hand, it is cross platform.
CEGUI is a powerful GUI library but I am not sure (since you did not clarify) what you mean by lightweight. It contains a lot of headers, too, but they are all related to the GUI or the rendering of it. On my computer, the current Release built in default VS2010 Release mode takes about 3 MB in total for the dlls. There are of course assets that take space too, but clearly these may vary depending on your needs. It uses XML and image files in the assets, the images take the most space. It requires a bunch of dlls depending on your requirements (png, jpeg, xml parsing dlls) but they are all quite small in Release. So unless you are irrationally pedantic about having too many DLLs in use, this should be no issue.
It is written in C++ (0.7-1.0 will be based on C99 standard, 2.0+ will be in C++11 standard) and supports dynamic and static linking. Dynamic linking is the supported type on Windows. Static linking on Windows is not recommended for CEGUI.
Here a short summary of features:
Modern (uses STL, XML for its asset files, and internally supports C99 standard for maximum compatibility, after the 1.0 Release it will be using C++11 in the development branch). It also has support for unicode characters and all sort of languages (as can be seen in the samples).
Offers the following widgets out-of-the-box: text fields (scrollable), editboxes, multiline editboxes, spinners, checkboxes, buttons, radio-buttons, tabbed windows, progress bars, scrollable panes, sliders, dropdown-menus (comboboxes), menu bars, layout containers (vertical/horizontal) and more
Published under the Open Source MIT license, one of the licenses offering you the most freedom, you will only need to distribute the license file with the application and that's it
Layouts can easily be created and edited using a WYSIWYG editor written in Python. It is called CEED and is also freely available. It has gone through a lot of testing and is suitable to be used for production. A stable Release has been published and new features are in development for the future. An imageset editor is also available in the same application.
As stated, this is free for commercial use. The only obligation you have is to distribute the license file.
CEGUI is fit for cross-platform use. It officially supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS. It has also been used on iOS and Android. Android is supported in the development branch.
It was originally designed as a GUI library for games but it is also perfect for usage in scientific applications, rendering applications, visualisation. Desktop applications can be done as well. A simple Windows-like skin is available in the default assets.
It has been around for over 10 years, has an active community and is a robust, feature-rich and extensible library.
wxWidgets
IUP is the smallest one i know, both in terms of learning curve, DLL size and features
Try eGui (see here or here) or WTL.
try GTK with Glade3.
Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC)
Considering you are looking for a WINDOWS ONLY SOLUTION, (and that wxWidgets has been voted up on this thread) you may want to trade off some lightweight-ness and checkout MFC.
As far as Windows is concerned, MFC and wxWidgets seem to compete neck & neck, but overall, the former is lighter than the latter.
Some PROS:-
MSVC MFC RAD support. Visual Studio arguably provides the best "RAD
tool & GUI lib" combo. The only other "dynamic duo" that comes close
is that of QtCreator & QT. wxSmith doesn't fully support all
wxWidgets components, but it keeps improving. Very Very Rich set of
commercial GUI components.
Free (but proprietary).
Very nice when it comes to databound controls.
Some CONS:-
The day you decide to port to other platforms, you will wish you had gone with a cross platform lib.
Proprietary nature of MFC means you will have to navigate licencing very very carefully. But AFAIK, MFC is free to redistribute in binary form.Here's a nice article touching on the "oil and water" that is "MFC and FLOSS applications". Apparently, they just might mix.
Anyways, appart from MFC, I think the FOX-Toolkit also deserves a mention, but just like FLTK, the major downside is lack of decent IDEs and RAD tools as compared to, say, QT or wxWidgets
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I want to create a standalone C++ desktop application which will be close-source, commercial and will not require the user to have the required DLLs in the machine.
It has, at least, to work for Windows. If it can be built for all platforms, that would be awesome.
This means I do not want the application to use the .NET Framework and all required DLLs must be shipped with the (only) executable the client will download.
I found and tested a dummy MFC application, it seems possible to do everything I require, but every comment I hear about MFC is that it is bad designed, about to be obsolete, bad choice, hard to use, etc etc etc.
I see lots of people recommend Qt, but I read that I can't ship the library unless I pay a commercial license, or the application has to be open-source.
wxWidgets, from what I read, seems to follow the same bad design of MFC.
However, many of the comments I read seem to be for years ago. It seems that Qt has changed its license, so something may have changed in the meanwhile.
If you were me and had these requirements, what framework/library would you pick and why?
I see lots of people recommend Qt, but I read that I can't ship the library unless I pay a commercial license, or the application has to be open-source.
This is wrong. Qt is available under the LGPL license, which means you absolutely can ship your application closed-source, as long as you provide a way for the end-user to be able to modify/update the Qt dependency. Typically this means using a shared Qt library and deploying the DLL files with your application, so that the end-user can replace the DLL files if they wanted to. However it is also possible to link statically in which case you must provide a way for your end-users to re-link it. This means that you'd have to ship compiled code (object files) with your application as a minimum. Note: I'm not a lawyer, and you should thoroughly investigate the license terms yourself before you make any decision.
However, many of the comments I read seem to be for years ago. It seems that Qt has changed its license, so something may have changed in the meanwhile.
As far as I can tell, Qt added LGPL as one of the available licenses in version 4.5 which was released in March 2009. So yes, those comments are almost 4 years out of date.
Note: Apart from the specific points I've addressed, it is hard to answer your question more generally for two reasons - (1) this site considers posts asking for recommendations to be off-topic, and (2) you've said, "if you were me and had these requirements, what framework/library would you pick and why", but you haven't actually said what those requirements are - it seems apparent that you want the library to be able to do GUIs, but what else? There are many different frameworks and libraries for C++ and they all do different things.
I really don't see what's the problem with Qt. I agree with what JBentley said - it implies that it would be in fact a good choice if you're looking for a modern framework. Qt offers much more functionality than MFC.
There is no problem shipping commercial, closed-source, statically linked applications that use Qt. Been there, done that, and it works just fine. Single .exe is all you provide. I'm not a lawyer, but generally what you need to provide on request is a static .lib file generated from your code's object files, so that it can be re-linked by the end user with their own copy of Qt.
There's nothing bad about that from a commercial standpoint -- if you can't afford the cost of a commercial Qt license, the requirement to make a .lib file if your compiled closed-source code shouldn't be a big deal. Make it a part of your build process, so that it's not an extra burden. You don't need to distribute this .lib file, just provide it on request. It doesn't have to be recompiled for the requester's platform or anything like that - whatever compiler you use to compile Qt and your application is all you need.
If one is serious about it, one will ask an IP lawyer to explain the implications of the licensing terms of any software you intend to redistribute with one;s product. So it doesn't matter if it's Qt or MFC, one goes and asks a lawyer. It's not like somehow LGPL implies "go to a lawyer", but a possibly much more complex Microsoft license doesn't. Unless one's stance is that it's OK to ignore MS licenses, but not OK to ignore FSF licenses :/
Have a look at these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits
Maybe SmartWin++? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartWin%2B%2B
Cheers
MFC is alive and well and will meet your requirements. I (still) use it frequently. If your app GUI is basic and does not need most of the MFC features then ATL would be a very good choice. Both MFC and ATL can be statically linked so no DLLs need to be shipped with the app.
I am trying to save some money and develop a desktop application that would work on both Windows and a Mac OS. Is this possible? Can we do it in C++ and then, with a few fixes and tweaks, still reuse the same app on both OS?
Yes this is possible. Some code may differ as there are differences in the operating systems.
You should use a common library for GUI such as Qt: http://qt.nokia.com/
It is worth noting that Qt brings much more cross-platform features to the table, so familiarize yourself with it.
There will be some differences to handle such as
File paths (C: doesn't exist on Mac, \ and / are path separators, etc)
File endings differ (CrLf in Windows, Lf in Mac)
You need to compile to two different target CPU's. Most C++ compilers can do this.
The same code can be used for both, you just define regions to be (or not be) included depending on what OS the compiler is targeting.
Just Google a cross-os development guide, looooots of people has done this before. :)
It may not be relevant, but still worth noting (because you said "save money"), that both Java and the Mono Project (.Net, Qt) allows you to write cross platform applications with limited skills about the underlying platform. They are higher level language which in general are considered a time saver (but that is a separate discussion.)
Expanding on my comment:
Don't.
Write your library code in portable C++; putting as much as possible of the functionality in the library, making sure you study the platform-specific APIs (probably Cocoa and .NET) as you go, so the interfaces to the library are at least moderately suitable for either.
Then wrap your library in native binaries; ensuring that you pay attention to how applications are supposed to look on each platform, as well as the feel of them.
Building an application that looks like an X11 application and does everything in a manner somewhere between a Gnome application, a KDE application, an OS X application and a Windows application will really hurt user experience.
Badly.
WxWidgets
This question gets asked a lot, see also:
this question, this one and this one amongst others.
Coming in late to the party here!
I'm in the last stages of finishing a cross-platform, commercial application (OS/X and Windows for right now, conceivably Linux or iOS later).
We're using an open-source, cross-platform C++ development library called Juce, and I can't speak highly enough of it. It's extremely full-featured, the code is solid and high-quality, and you can apparently build for Windows, OS/X, Linux, iOS and Android from the same codebase (we've only tried the first two, but other developers are apparently reporting success for the other platforms).
What's particularly nice is that lead developer is very active on his bulletin boards and extremely responsive to trouble reports.
Also, you can license the library under GPL, and they also have a very reasonably priced commercial license.
Juce is very popular amongst people doing digital audio applications - indeed, to my best knowledge many or perhaps most of the top commercial digital audio apps use this system - but it's very full-featured and extremely fast and should be considered a top candidate for any cross-platform development application.
I have been writing C++ Console/CMD-line applications for about a year now and would like to get into windows GUI apps. For those of you who have taken this road before, what advice/tips can you give me. Ex: good readings, tutorials, approach tactics, etc...
I know this is a really broad question, but i really don't know how/where to start, thus not knowing how to ask this question properly.
I highly recommend the use of the Qt Libraries for several reasons:
The Framework is freely available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, and a couple of mobile systems. Since version 4.5 the license is LGPL, which basically means that you can use Qt even in commercial applications.
The design of Qt is out-standing, e.g. they use modern design patterns and a very consistent interface design (I don't know many other libraries that use object-oriented ideas in such perfection). Using Qt is the same as using Boost: it will improve your own programming skills, because they use such beautiful concepts!
They are bloody fast, for instance in rendering (due to the different back-end for OpenGL, DirectX, etc.). Just have a look on this video and you see what can easily be done with Qt but is hard to achieve with native Windows, Mac, or Linux programming.
They have a really great documentation, with tons of tutorials and a very good reference. You can start learning Qt easily with the given docs! The documentation is also available online, so have a look and see by yourself.
As mentioned before, Qt is cross-platform; you have one source-base that works on all the important operating systems. Why will you limit yourself to Windows, when you can also have Mac and Linux "for free"?
Qt is so much more than "just" the user interface; they also offer network and database functionality, OpenGL bindings, a full-working web-browser control (based on WebKit), a multimedia playback library, and much much much more.
Honestly, I wasted a couple of years by developing software natively for Windows, while I could have been so much more productive.
For C++ you have two choices, Native or Managed.
For native development, my team (at Microsoft, in Windows) uses the Windows Template Library. It works very well for us.
You should learn the basics of Win32 and how Windowing works. The canonical tome is Programming Windows®
For Managed development you can use C++ with Windows Forms. However, windows forms has been supplanted by Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
Here is a good site that can get you up to speed.
This tutorial is useful
You can use Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition for your tools (they are free).
My best advice for Windows C++ GUI programming is don't do Windows C++ GUI programming.
I realize that is an extremely uninformative/smartass response if it's not qualified, so I'll note that you don't state that you need to do C++ Windows GUI programming, but that you "Would like to get into Windows GUI apps." If that is the case, and you don't have a very specific reason to use C++ (i.e. gigantic existing legacy codebase written in MFC or a bunch of C++ code that you want to build a front-end for but would be a pain to expose to .NET code), then it is going to be a lot easier and more productive to go the .NET route and start learning Windows Forms or better yet WPF using C# or another .NET language of your choice.
If you do need to go C++, then I would second the recommendations for 3rd party toolkits like Qt or wxWidgets, as the state of C/C++ GUI programming tools from Microsoft is now abysmal.
Most windowing libraries and technologies use similar idioms. Pick one and learn it.
The Windows Template Library is a very nice veneer for Microsoft Windows while sticking with C++.
For cross platform C++ windowing toolkits (they work on Microsoft Windows as well as other platforms) you can try QT or wxWidgets.
Well, for the Windows GUI, get used to referencing the MSDN a lot, assuming you want to deal with the API directly.
My favorite resource for learning the basics was theForger's tutorial, but there are hundreds of books and other sites out there.
I guess an important place to start is your toolkit. You tagged this visualc++, so I assume you are looking at that, however remember there are other toolkits like Qt.
I would suggest starting at Microsoft's tutorials.
+1 for Qt. I would put documentation at the top of my list of requirements for a GUI system. Qt has great docs and there's a huge community behind it. Also there are several books about it. Good docs are extremely important if you are working alone with no other team members to rely on. Alternatives are wxWidgets, MFC, WTL, FLTK and many more. They all have pros and cons. Eg FLTK is small and only provides GUI whereas Qt and wxWidgets also include networking, database access etc. Qt seems to have the most momentum at the moment after the Nokia buyout eg the release of Qt Creator which enables you to develop apps outside of Visual Studio.
It has been so long since I worked with C++ on Windows GUI, my word is always avoid C++ in Windows GUI unless you have a very good reason, I mean a good darn reason, if you need some performance C# is more than enough for 90% of the cases, and if you need more power write your performance critical thing in a C++ dll, and call it from a Windows Forms or WPF application.
It will save you hell of a lot time.
Still my opinion, if you have another I totally respect that
The first question is that do you want to develop Free, Open Source, for personal use or Commercial applications in C++?
If you want to develop for personal use! Then you can go with some good C++ Toolkit, Framework or API.
If you want to develop an GUI application that will be open source or free. Then you can go with C++ Toolkits, Frameworks or API's that have the GPL or any open source license that fits your needs.
Even you can develop Commercial applications with open source toolkits, frameworks or API's that have LGPL license.
The second question is that do you want to develop for the Windows, Mac, Unix or Linux? or these all, even for the mobile platform?
If you have a Windows user, as I am, and want to develop only for the Windows, I mean not for the cross platform, you can go with Win32 API, although, learning Win32 API is harder but it gives you the complete control over the machine. Believe me that no other tool would you provide the complete control over the machine. If you dislike Win32 API, for any reason, you can go with MFC, which is another technology from Microsoft, but is not free, old and has less attention now a days. If you decide to develop with .NET platform, you have C++/CLI, an extension to C++ language for developing .NET applications. .NET gives you the type safety, OOP and a built in garbage collector, provides you the all API's related to Windows and x86 or x64 machine in one package.
.NET has its own world! Microsoft has decided to port .NET to other operating systems too, Mono project is an example... You can develop nearly all kinds of applications using .NET.
If you want to develop C++ GUI applications for the cross platform, then Qt, WxWidgets and U++ are available for your help. You can write once and deploy anywhere with these libraries. Many open source IDE's and compliers are also available to develop C++ applications with ease. Note that if you do not want to develop for the cross platform, any cross platform library would be overhead and unavoidable increase in size of the executables.
Is your C++ knowledge is good enough to program software systems?
In fact, if your knowledge of C++ is not enough deep and you do not understand programming methods like OOP, Encupsolation, Classes, Interfaces, Types, Programming Patterns and so on, you can not use any toolkit with full potencial.
Do not forget that every Toolkit, Framework or API is implemented in some programming language. If you do understand the language very well, you can use the toolkit very well. I think, you would understand my point.
Put aside WPF or VC++ or Qt, You can also try out several libraries such as :
OpenFrameworks
Processing
...
there's an active project for developing Gui with Openframeworks here:
http://www.syedrezaali.com/blog/?p=2172
Are you familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET technologies? Since you want to develop for Windows platforms why don't you start by taking a look at Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition.? Explore a little with the available tools from MS and search for some tutorials.
We are in 2020 but the question is still pertinent. I agree with Qt users, it's a great framework.
However, there is also C++Builder that offers you design GUI visually at design-time. C++Builder application can be built on both VCL (Windows only) and FireMonkey (cross-platorm) frameworks. Clang compiler can produce both 32 and 64-bits native executables. Community edition of C++Builder is free. Delphi integration is seamless: C++Builder project can include Delphi files directly and use any existing Delphi component packages and libraries.
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I am writing a fairly large and complex data analysis program and I have reached the point where I think it is about time to build a GUI for the program. So my question is:
Which GUI toolkit should I use?
I am completely new to coding and building GUIs and would appreciate any guidance that can be offered. It doesn't have to be the simplest tool kit in the world, I learn rather fast. However, it does need to be able to do the following things (some if not all of these are probably incredibly basic for any given toolkit but I thought that it would be good to throw all this out there just in case).
It has to allow me to draw directly to the screen so that I can put graphs (spectra really), plots and things like them up for the user to see. I need to be able to collect position information on where they clicked on aforementioned spectra. I need to be able to display text and take text input from the user. It needs to be able to generate menus (you know File, Edit, etc). If it were to have some built in widget for generating tables that would be handy (though I can surmount a lack of that if I can draw directly to the screen). It needs to be able to pop up warnings, dialogue boxes, save and open boxes, etc. That is pretty much it, most of these seem pretty basic when I write them out but I don't want to get the GUI partly coded and then realize that I I need to rewrite it with a different toolkit.
It should be noted that I have written this program in C++ and that I don't want to have to write the GUI part in C or something else so the toolkit needs to support C++.
Additionally a cross platform toolkit would be preferable over a single platform toolkit. However if it must be a single platform toolkit then I would prefer it be for Linux.
Finally, I would DRAMATICALLY prefer an open source toolkit to a closed source toolkit.
Beyond that I cannot think of anything to add. Thank you in advance for your time and answers.
Hmmm based on the answers I shall look at both Qt and wxWidgets and see which appeals to me more. I with I could accept multiple answers as accepted but I can't, and since I am looking at two things it would be unfair to only accept one of the answers, perhaps in a week or two then I have looked at the toolkits and figured out which I want to use.
For C++, in my opinion, Qt is the least frustrating and most fully featured toolkit. Its also fully cross platform. Note that Qt will be LGPL licensed some time in March 2009, when version 4.5 becomes available. Currently, its only offered in a GPL and commercial license version.
Qt's GUI designer is good. It has lots of utility functions (scene graph library, translation support, built-in Javascript engine, built-in WebKit library). Via the MOC (a special pre-compiler) it also brings a few run-time binding capabilities and introspection to C++.
For your technical application, you might find that Qwt (http://qwt.sourceforge.net/) provides what you need. It is built upon Qt.
Qt can even be used "headless" if you want its utility support (such as networking, etc) without a GUI.
The other cross platform C++ option is wxWidgets, which is usable but not really comparable to Qt. Its a much lower level toolkit, and isn't as easy to use or fully rounded. Gtkmm is another option, in the spirit of GTK+.
Try WxWidgets. Cross platform (compile on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) and widely accepted.
http://www.wxwidgets.org/
Open Source too!
I see nobody commented on GTKmm. It is the C++ incarnation of GTK+, and it is a real pleasure to use. I have also used Qt, but I don't like the messy signal/connect code, the moc_XXX generated files, etc. GTKmm has signals and such, but not that preprocessing step, as well as almost all of the Qt toolkit can offer in the graphics arena.
I'd say it depends on whether or not you want the native Look and Feel of the OSes you're targeting for your application. Qt, like said earlier, is probably the easiest of the cross platform toolkits to use, however it is its own widget set. You don't get a native app look & feel unless you happen to be running on KDE.
I use wxWidgets at work. It can be frustrating at times and in some places not very polished, but it does give the native look and feel for the platforms you're targeting. It actually wraps the native UI controls to give them a common API on all platforms that wxWidgets is ported to.
I had the same question and searched for good GUI toolkits.
At the end I found out, that a GUI toolkit isn't enough - I need a complete platform independent solution providing me the build environment, IDE integration and lower level functions like network sockets and file I/O.
My result? Since nearly 9 years I use Qt (but the first years only for GUI stuff) - now I have highly complex networking apps with load balancing, massive multithreading and image processing.
You can use Qt as commercial user with professional support (like me) or just start your own projects under GPL and with 4.5 with LGPL (which allows commercial use).
The other alternatives like wxWidgets and GTK++ are very good choices for GUI programming.
But if you want a well documented and complete solution, then Qt is your choice.
Best Regards,
3DH
I'd also recommend wxWidgets together with DialogBlocks, which is a really nice visual GUI builder.
I will say that wxWidgets has a few rough edges, but the development community is very active and extremely responsive to bug reports / questions / contributions.
I use wxWidgets(toolkit) + wxFormBuilder(gui-designer) + eclipse(ide).
All tools are cross-platform and free.
Qt. Also you can use KDE which is built on top of Qt.
On my side job as programmer, I am to write a program in C++ to convert audio files from/to various formats. Probably, this will involve building a simple GUI.
Will it be a great effort to build seperate GUIs for Mac and Windows using Cocoa and WinForms instead of a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or GTK? (I will have to maintain a seperate Windows-version and Mac-Version anyway)
The GUI will probably be very simple and only need very basic functionality.
I always felt that native GUIs feel far more intuitive than its cross-platform brethren...
If you have the expertise, use native frontends, it'll effectively double the job you have to do for UI but from my experience non-native UI is a little bit clunkier than their native counterparts.
Have you looked at wxWidgets? Cross platform native controls.
I would agree that if possible, native front-ends are the way to go. I've not used wxWidgets recently, and I've heard it's come a long way, but back when it was wxWindows, we built an app with it that was spec'd to be built in X/Motif. When we finished the effort and delivered it, the customer said it did not look enough like X/Motif, and we had to re-work the entire UI at our expense... Joel Spolsky wrote a good article on this, but I can't remember the title. What he did say, IIRC, was the problem with Java and some other cross-platform UI was that "your dog barks at my app" - it's the little inconsistencies that annoy folks.
Cross-platform toolkits, more or less, all make the incorrect assumption that the difference between platforms is a matter of button placement and widget styling. In some cases you can get away with this - a Qt app will feel fairly native on both Windows (where UI conventions are very lax) and on Linux, particularly a KDE environment. In general, you can move between Linux and Windows relatively easily; conventions are similar, and the Windows community is lax about them.
Mac is the hard one. Its UI is built around an entirely different paradigm than either Windows or most Linux environments.
But in general, in a native app it's easier to speak the native language of the platform in more ways than just widget style.
Yes.
But seriously, it depends on your goals. I agree that the native UI libraries, with a bunch of effort put into them, will give vastly better results, but for lots of apps, a very basic UI is sufficient and a lot less effort if you take one of the existing cross platform frameworks.
Maybe starting with the CLI and getting functionality working makes the most sense for an audio conversion application.
I'm going to write my own cross platform application GUI layer for this soon.
Depending on the complexity of your application this can be a fraction of what is required for QT, GTK or FOX.
Reason is that we see a tendency that the platform vendors (Apple first) tries to design there system so that it looks unique. This makes it much harder for QT, GTK, FOX and other platform tools to constantly keep in sync with the latest widgets.
When the underlaying technique becomes more and more the same the OS vendors have no option then branding on look and feel of the platform.
wxWidgets used standard c++ syntax and preprocessor thus make you easily alter from plain C or C++. And will produce very native look where is appear, be it on GTK, X11, MS-Windows or Mac.
It's mature since 20yrs of 1rst release, has complete documentation with easy navigating, and supported by large community arround the world.
Coding in your favorite IDE or use prominent Eclipse-IDE and wxFormBuilder as GUI designer. Build wx library and IDE/Toolchain setup could be found on this link: http://yasriady.blogspot.co.id/2016/01/raspberry-pi-toolchain.html
Develop your application in Linux desktop and also provided compiler for Raspberry Pi2 (target application tested work smootly on Raspbian Jessie) ............