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MeMooMeM
January 25th, 2010, 03:38 AM
Hi everyone...

I have mostly developed research-based mathematical software and all I needed was mostly VIM, GNU compilers and Makefiles. But now I am willing to add some simple GUI components, such as a open file dialog, properties editor, start/stop buttons, nothing fancy.

I would very much appreciate any advice on which IDE/SDK to use :) Here's what I would like to have:

* Completely free, e.g., I will *not* be completely happy with free but restricted version of Qt

* Native multi-platform support, e.g., GTK+ looks almost perfect but it requires X11 on MacOSX (please correct me if I am wrong).

* Graphic based GUI builder. Does Eclipse support GUI builder extensions? Can I find a plugin for wxWidgeds? I am a beginner and it looked difficult to create the GUI using commands.

Also netbeans caught my eye, which include Qt toolkit I guess. But I don't want Qt.

Thanks a lot!

PS: I am reading that Eclipse in the Ubuntu software repository comes with many problems... Is that the case?

mohaakilla51
January 25th, 2010, 03:45 AM
wxWidgets will do all of the above, and with wxDev-C++, you also have a graphical editor for your UI.

wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/)
wxDev-C++ (http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/)

Personally, I'm not a fan of wxWidgets, though a lot of people are. Give it a try.

MeMooMeM
January 25th, 2010, 04:34 AM
wxWidgets will do all of the above, and with wxDev-C++, you also have a graphical editor for your UI.

This looks like a good solution, thanks!

Update: Uh-oh... is it just for windows?? I will be developing on Ubuntu...



Personally, I'm not a fan of wxWidgets


Is there a particular reason? Do you prefer explicit coding because defaults in UI editors mess things up? Also, given that I have zero GUI experience, what kind of a learning curve should I expect?

Thanks :)

matthew.ball
January 25th, 2010, 05:16 AM
I was going to recommend wxFormBuilder with vim, but wxDev-C++ seems to look quite nice.

Anjuta also has some wx-support, but I don't believe it has a GUI builder (though you could always use wxFormBuilder to create the form and code in Anjuta if you wanted).

Edit: Mmm, apparently wxDev-C++ is Windows only.

nmccrina
January 25th, 2010, 05:23 AM
What do you have against Qt? It is available under the LGPL or GPL, and actually is the second-easiest GUI framework I've used (the easiest is Java Swing). Also, there is Eclipse integration. Note, I have never tried WxWidgets.

mohaakilla51
January 25th, 2010, 06:21 AM
Ouch. I completely forgot that wxDev-C++ was windows only. Hadn't used it in forever =/

And yes, I prefer to code UI by hand, because it is very difficult to read anything generated by tools.

Well: If you ever want to program on Windows, use Dev-C++/wxDev-C++ :P

MeMooMeM
January 25th, 2010, 07:09 AM
What do you have against Qt?

Can I use Qt in commercial code? I will not sell my code, but the way I will use it may be considered commercial. Maybe I should read license descriptions more carefully :)