Hi,

I need to develop a gui application on linux using c++. The application needs to have extensive gui work, such as, a rectangle, inside which some text is written, the program(in c++) will take the text out of the rectangle, process it and produce some output.

Also, the rectangle has to be interactive, that is, it should be able to detect events such as mouse click on it, and execute trigger associated with this event.

Please tell me which tool kit should I use for it. Please suggest me something based on c++ on linux only.

The very first graphical application I have done was written using QuickCG library, which is based on SDL. It is very simple, yet quite powerful.

Try it, you might like it: http://student.kuleuven.be/~m0216922/CG/

And good luck

Thanks!! Before I go ahead with studying about QuickCG, could you please tell me if its possible to develop following using it or not:

user should be able to draw a rectangle(or a pentagon) anywhere on the screen and move it anywhere on the screen to place it properly. Then user should be able to write some text on the rectangle which the program will take and process to produce some output. Actually, the application is about drawing a list of figures by users(from pre-defined list which includes circle, rectangle, parallelogram, etc), which the user should be able to drag and drop from a provided list, resize it and enter some text into it.

Thanks in advance!

You can use wxWidgets, for example use the programmaing IDE Code::Blocks or wxDev-C++.

You can also use Mono

wxWidgets has a lot of documentation for the basic properties you will use it for. wxDev is great and a bit more friendly due to it being very much the same to MFC, with a visual form for tweaking. Can be a bit buggy however, great way to get into it though.

I have worked with many Linux GUI library's. The easiest one to work with is Gtk+ in my opinion. It is easy to start with and you can quickly get an app going with it especially if you combine it with the glade gui builder. The one that produces the best looking apps is Qt (again imo.) You can combine it with QtDesigner or KDevelop to have a full IDE environment to work with it in as well as drag and drop gui building.

So having gotten those out of the way... wxWidgets is the best out there at the moment. I think it is the best no matter what platform you are developing on because it's portability is simply incredible. wxWidgets isn't just a GUI library but a portability framework as quoted from the wxWidget's founders book Cross-Platform GUI Programming With wxWidgets



wxWidgets contains it's own functionality for a lot of the things that are troublesome in porting such as launching external applications, file io, sockets, threads, and many other necessary tasks. It is completely class based and the API structure makes sense. It is a great toolkit to work with. When you compile your app in Linux it will look like it belongs in Linux. When you compile it in OS X, Windows, or any one of the many platforms supported it will look native (and most of the time the widgets are the native ones.) If you use Code::Blocks and wxSmith or wxFormBuilder you will have a completely cross-platform environment to work in so that you are looking at the same application and working with the same project files whether you are working in Windows or Linux. I have been writing Linux apps and porting them to other platforms for many years and I have only been looking at wxWidgets and Code::Blocks as a multi-platform solution for the last year. I am very excited about it.

So now that I have gotten my spill out of the way... I would recommend wWidgets.

I don't like doing GUI work but QT's user interface building program was pretty slick. They have a video on it if you browse over to their website.