Gui toolkits, which should I use? [closed]

Answer 1

Try WxWidgets. Cross platform (compile on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) and widely accepted.

http://www.wxwidgets.org/

Open Source too!

Answer 2

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+.

Answer 3

I use wxWidgets(toolkit) + wxFormBuilder(gui-designer) + eclipse(ide). All tools are cross-platform and free.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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