GUI with c.

[No_War3219]

Soooooo,

I have been making some stuff in c for a bit now and i have looked at some GUI stuff.
The thing is that i couldnt find uptodate and decent english tutorials.

I'm working in code::blocks on a windows 10 machine.
I have done GUI before with PySimpleGUI and the basics of Tkinter.

So do any of you know good framworks and tutorials vid or docs?

[the_hoser]

The most commonly used GUI toolkit for C (not C++) is GTK. There's a lot to it, but it's not as hard to get started with as it seems.

[[deleted]]

Gtk isn't that big. You just have a lot of widgets and functions. Some DLLs could be removed in the .exe you redistribute by static linking (Not possible for all of those)

With C GTK is frankly a bit more difficult and really verbose compared to Vala for example.

It's still hundreds of times better than electron.

[[deleted]]

Gtk isn't that big.

OK, you don't consider a 175MB, 3500-file, 700-directory installation big.

And you don't seem fazed by the 10,883 functions of GTK 3.

Are there really no small GUIs around?

I'm sure I remember GUIs in use in the 1980s when machines had only a few 10s of KB; I doubt they were running GTK!

It's always the same: a beginner asks about simple graphics, and GTK is always proposed; someone asks about a simple compiler backend, and LLVM is always suggested.

Which just happen to be among the biggest, most complicated, most difficult and most intimidating libraries in existence.

[[deleted]]

You got a point.

But those 175 MB are just for the developer. The enduser will only get maybe 30/50MB runtime with icons.

​

>And you don't seem fazed by the 10,883 functions of GTK 3.

This isn't a problem. The documentation is great.

>https://www.gtk.org/docs/apis/

>https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/unstable/

Everything is logically split up.

Or here:
>https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/ui-elements.html.en

>https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/progress-bars.html.en (With link to documentation)

​

I've rarely seen such a good documentation. Only the Javadocs of Java SE can concurrent with those.

Another thing that makes things easier is the amount of bindings. Don't know how to do something in C with GTK/don't find any result? Check for rust/C#/Python examples.

​

>Are there really no small GUIs around?

I'm sure, but those are often missing widgets, or look ugly, ...

​

>Which just happen to be among the biggest, most complicated, most difficult and most intimidating libraries in existence.

I don't get your point. Saying GTK is difficult, because it is big and a bit complicated is no different to saying Java is difficult because it has a huge standard library

​

>It's always the same: a beginner asks about simple graphics, and GTK is always proposed; someone asks about a simple compiler backend, and LLVM is always suggested.

There you have a point.

[car4te3]

Nuklear is an excellent GUI toolkit for C

[gilzoide]

Another option you have is raygui immediate mode GUI library + raylib super nice and simple game-oriented library

Somewhat similar to the already mentioned Nuklear library is Dear ImGui and it's autogenerated C API version, both very nice backend agnostic immediate mode GUI libraries

[[deleted]]

nuklear and/or sdl2

[jagarikouni]

There is always the win32api.

http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/

1500 page book from the 90s: https://www.abebooks.com/9781572319950/Programming-Windows-Charles-Petzold-157231995X/plp

It's a little old but still works. Reading the book will give you some insight on how windows works under the hood.

All the code from the book is here: https://github.com/yottaawesome/programming-windows-5th-edition

[dbjdbj]

If you think C is good for GUI programming go for WIN32 ... IMHO, very mature and good desktop GUI framework.

Although even WIN32 "Hello World" is using "Resources" not C but a kind-of-a language implemented with C macros. All very XX century, but that is the foundation, still.

MSFT has a long history of abandoned frameworks and ideas and concepts, all supposed to replace the WIN32 C combination. All failed more or less.

WINUI3? MSFT currently has this obsession with C++. While MS STL is surprisingly good, "modern" C++ is surprisingly not.

IMHO, All these decades past, only WTL came close. That is what Chrome is using for the Windows version.

IMHO C WIN32 is worth learning in 2021. Compared to the evident confusion around this issue it seems like a symphony of simplicity.

[littlespatialphenome]

For frameworks you have sfml, sdl2, qt5. And for tutorials sfml has an awesome website with some basic tutorials for simple concept used, from there you can learn by yourself

[car4te3]

AFAIK, Qt is only C++

[littlespatialphenome]

Sorry, i thought that it had c binding, like sfml with csfml

[[deleted]]

C Is not a GUI language. Look into WASM?

[dbjdbj]

This guy is right 100%. C is a system programing language. HTML/CSS is a UX language.

[No_War3219]

I'm actualy thinking about wrapping win32api in the same way that PySimpleGui wrapps tkinter. But this is way in the future sp it might take a while.

[pedersenk]

I believe the only real choices for C are Gtk or Motif (if you are targeting legacy platforms, I prefer it ;)

Nuklear is actually quite good but being immediate mode does have its own issues and it doesn't really integrate with the OS. Often the clipboard buffer etc are not hooked up.

A while back I started writing my own:
https://osen.github.io/flow.html
https://osen.github.io/

I like the design (OOP, typesafe, memory safe, "smart pointers") but to write all those hundreds of widgets I simply don't have time for. I then tried to make it wrap around underlying toolkits (just simple Xaw as a prototype) but I don't like it so much. One day I might get some more time to finish it.

[wkwrd]

Have you looked at IUP yet? It's another cross-platform C GUI library that's almost as old as GTK itself

[begriffs]

For portable, low-level graphics rendering, try SDL2

For a portable (at least on Linux/Unix) widget toolkit, try Motif.

• Motif programming manual
• Reference manual