What libraries for a simple gui?

[szatox]

It's going to be a while until I actually get to work, but I want to gather some ideas in advance.

I will want to make a very simple GUI, and I'm looking for a toolkit for the job. I hope for:
Something light-weight and easy to start with, preferably already in portage, though it is not a hard requirement.
It needs to immediately respond to both, user's clicks and drags as well as events from the controlled application.
I'll need runtime-determined number of boxes containing text labels (it must not spill out) placed at arbitrary locations and a bunch of lines with some color and thickness.

I think I'll go with LUA for this one, but I'm open to other options. There will be no heavy computation to do, mostly array / table manipulation for maintaining the state. Either way: I'll need bindings and docs (and probably tutorials for dummies / beginner's guides)

That's about it, what are your thoughts?

[Anon-E-moose]

Unfortunately I don't think that there are a lot of simple toolkits, gtk and qt pretty much dominate.
But a gui for what, framebuffer, X or wayland? And which binding language?

http://lua-users.org/wiki/GraphicalUser ... ceToolkits

[szatox]

GUI for X11 for now, I kinda expect the toolkit to take care of wayland compatibility too. But it's not a priority.

What do you mean by which binding language?
I suppose I'll be writing it in LUA, so I'd need lua bindings for the toolkit. But I'm not fully committed to this choice, I might take something else if there is a good combo for simple apps that's also beginner friendly.

[Anon-E-moose]

GUI for X11 for now, I kinda expect the toolkit to take care of wayland compatibility too. But it's not a priority.

What do you mean by which binding language?

C, C++, Rust, etc with lua used for configuration and or special shapes, like people that use conky sometime make.

Depending on what you are doing something like Xdialog might work
Where Xdialog handles gui front end, and a scripting language used for logic.

I know the xdialog package in portage is old and based on gtk2, but someone extended it to work with gtk3, I use it as a simple menu frontend.
But Xdialog is pretty versatile, both with input and output forms.

[logrusx]

gtk-layer-shell or something like that is popular among developers of small and medium tools for Wayland compositors. I think it should work fine for X. Under Wayland, it's XWayland's job to provide compatibility, not the toolkit or library.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[Zucca]

FLTK?

[xaviermiller]

or tcl/tk ?

[wjb]

Tk is really neat and there are bindings for quite a few languages - there is a lua binding (albeit not in portage). Git and mercurial use tk for their gui repository browsers. Platform independent.

Qml for something pretty, although you do have to understand the basics of Qt signals/slots.

Imgui because the demo is awesome. C++ with a game-type event loop. OpenGL / Vulkan.

[Zucca]

Imgui because the demo is awesome. C++ with a game-type event loop. OpenGL / Vulkan.

Oh yes. This has to be the most eye-pleasing lightweight gui toolkit.

[szatox]

I hope to do logic in lua, and call something that will draw a window for me from within the script rather than writing logic in some other language and relegating lua to configs. If I were to do that, I'd rather simplify it by not inclding lua at all and just going with the other language.

Xdialog is pretty versatile, both with input and output forms.

"xdialog" looks like something that is displayed, waits for the user to click a button, and closes returning the response. I need something that can be modified after it has been displayed, and also respond to events different than clicking a button.
The other xdialog I found mentiones javascript... Is it the one you meant? Does it mean I'd need nodejs? 80MB of dependencies is quite a lot.

FLTK, TCL/TK and imgui all look pretty good at the first glance, do you guys have any experience with them?
How easy or difficult to start with are they?

Also, bindings... When I was digging around looking for toolkits, generators were mentioned a bunch of times, without details on using them.
I found moonlibs too. Has anyone used it? Is is good? https://github.com/stetre/moonlibs

[Anon-E-moose]

https://github.com/wdlkmpx/Xdialog is what I use, I made my own ebuild.
It's just the original xdialog updated to use gtk3.

and these are the different boxes http://web.mit.edu/outland/share/doc/Xd ... 2/box.html


Not used fltk, but tcl/tk is relatively easy, given that tcl is a script language, and it integrates well with expect if something like that is needed.

Expect -> DESCRIPTION="tool for automating interactive applications"

[C5ace]

szatox:

Have look at Glade (dev-util/glade-3.40.0-r2). Also if you can find it Anjuta IDE with Glade Plugin.

Or more simple, glade-2.12.2, which generated the C code for the GUI. You then only have to code the callback functions and logic to be displayed in windows, display boxes and read from input boxes. I used this a few years back to code some customs applications. I still have the ebuild and tar file with examples available.

[wjb]

For tcl/tk, if you have tk (8.6) installed take a look at the demo app which shows what it can do (and how its done).
$ wish /usr/lib64/tk8.6/demos/widget

I personally find tcl a bit hard going after a dozen or so lines so the two times I used tk for real at work it was python & tkinter. One app was a sequence of dialogs to configure a build script that had a lot of interdependent parameters, then hung around to announce success/fail of said build. The other app was a control panel used to start / stop / monitor multiple groups of PCs in a testing lab - nothing complicated: a pretty diagram overlaid with clicky bits, a big list of PCs details and wake-on-lan + remote shutdown + ping.

[sublogic]

FLTK, TCL/TK and imgui all look pretty good at the first glance, do you guys have any experience with them?
How easy or difficult to start with are they?

I have used FLTK and TCL/TK in the past.

For FLTK, you have to code in C++ but they use just the object-oriented features of the language, no RTTI or exceptions or STL. If you emerge fltk with [doc examples] you'll find plenty of code on which to build. It's a learning experience, like installing Gentoo, but longer and easier .

For TCL/TK, well you have to learn TCL, which is a bit weird but has its plusses.

There are front-ends like https://pyfltk.sourceforge.io/ . I don't know what there is on offer for lua.

[Genone]

Most likely won't fit your "lightweight" requirement, but for simple projects I'd look into Tkinter or Pyside6 for ease-of-use and multi-platform support (and to avoid dealing with toolchains and/or niche languages).

[szatox]

Thanks for suggestions, everyone.

Well, pyside alone is 200MB, while LOVE is 5MB, so yeah, certainly not lightweight, but it does seem to be quite noob-friendly* with all the tutorials and examples available, so I guess it is at least OK for a prototype, before a second round to hopefully make it good with something else. Unfortunately, LOVE doesn't seem to have the guide rails which would save me tones of work manually drawing buttons.

* It does not help my python allergy though: I can't tell what the scopes of variables are until I change them and A) something else blows up B) something else doesn't blow up.

[halcon]

FLTK, TCL/TK and imgui all look pretty good at the first glance, do you guys have any experience with them?
How easy or difficult to start with are they?

I have an experience with Perl/Tk. It is very simple and lightweight, in portage.

I'll need runtime-determined number of boxes containing text labels (it must not spill out) placed at arbitrary locations

I am not sure it will fit these requirements though... (If I understand them well)

docs (and probably tutorials for dummies / beginner's guides)

I would not say it has good docs, due to its low popularity, but its docs, per my experience, are usable.

It does not help my python allergy though: I can't tell what the scopes of variables are

Good point! Agreed! Perl does not have this problem

[Naib]

What language?
if it is python I would recommend tkinter (esp ttk) as it is built-into the language and thus provides a lighter script for places with python
otherwise qt6

[wildhorse]

Xt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Toolkit_Intrinsics

Beyond that: Motif