How do I build a graphical user interface in C

Question

All of my C   programs so far have been using the command line interface and the only other language I have experience with is PHP which doesn t support GUIs    Where do I start with graphical user interface programming in C    How do I create one

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There are plenty of free portable GUI libraries  each with its own strengths and weaknesses    Qt Dear ImGui GTKmm  based on GTK   wxWidgets FLTK Ultimate   JUCE        Especially Qt has nice tutorials and tools which help you getting started  Enjoy   Note  however  that you should avoid platform specific functionality such as the Win32 API or MFC  That ties you unnecessarily on a specific platform with almost no benefits

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I found a website with a  simple  tutorial  http   www winprog org tutorial start html

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It s easy to create a  NET Windows GUI in C     See the following tutorial from MSDN  You can download everything you need  Visual C   Express  for free   Of course you tie yourself to  NET  but if you re just playing around or only need a Windows application you ll be fine  most people still have Windows   for now

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Essentially  an operating system s windowing system exposes some API calls that you can perform to do jobs like create a window  or put a button on the window  Basically  you get a suite of header files and you can call functions in those imported libraries  just like you d do with stdlib and printf   Each operating system comes with its own GUI toolkit  suite of header files  and API calls  and their own way of doing things  There are also cross platform toolkits like GTK  Qt  and wxWidgets that help you build programs that work anywhere  They achieve this by having the same API calls on each platform  but a different implementation for those API functions that call down to the native OS API calls   One thing they ll all have in common  which will be different from a CLI program  is something called an event loop  The basic idea there is somewhat complicated  and difficult to compress  but in essence it means that not a hell of a lot is going in in your main class main function  except    check the event queue if there s any new events if there is  dispatch those events to appropriate handlers when you re done  yield control back to the operating system  usually with some kind of special  sleep  or  select  or  yield  function call  then the yield function will return when the operating system is done  and you have another go around the loop    There are plenty of resources about event based programming  If you have any experience with JavaScript  it s the same basic idea  except that you  the scripter have no access or control over the event loop itself  or what events there are  your only job is to write and register handlers   You should keep in mind that GUI programming is incredibly complicated and difficult  in general  If you have the option  it s actually much easier to just integrate an embedded webserver into your program and have an HTML web based interface  The one exception that I ve encountered is Apple s Cocoa Xcode  interface builder   tutorials that make it easily the most approachable environment for people new to GUI programming that I ve seen

User · Answer

OS independent algorithm  Creating GUI applications in C   in three steps     Install Qt Creator     Create new project  Qt Widgets Application      Build it    Congratulations  you ve got your first GUI in C     Now you re ready to read a lot of documentation to create something more complicate than  Hello world  GUI application

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Given the comment of  say Windows XP as an example   then your options are    Interact directly with the operating system via its API  which for Microsoft Windows is surprise surprise call Windows API  The definitive reference for the WinAPI is Microsoft s MSDN website  A popular online beginner tutorial for that is theForger s Win32 API Programming Tutorial  The classic book for that is Charles Petzold s Programming Windows  5th Edition  Use a platform  both in terms of OS and compiler  specific library such as MFC  which wraps the WinAPI into C   class  The reference for that is again MSDN  A classic book for that is Jeff Prosise s Programming Windows with MFC  2nd Edition  If you are using say CodeGear C   Builder  then the option here is VCL  Use a cross platform library such as GTK   C   wrapper  gtkmm   Qt  wxWidgets  or FLTK that wrap the specific OS s API  The advantages with these are that in general  your program could been compiled for different OS without having to change the source codes  As have already been mentioned  they each have its own strengths and weaknesses  One consideration when selecting which one to use is its license  For the examples given  GTK   amp  gtkmm is license under LGPL  Qt is under various licenses including proprietary option  wxWidgets is under its own wxWindows Licence  with a rename to wxWidgets Licence   and FLTK is under LGPL with exception  For reference  tutorial  and or books  refer to each one s website for details

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I use FLTK because Qt is not free  I don t choose wxWidgets  because my first test with a simple Hello  World   program produced an executable of 24 nbsp MB  FLTK 0 8 nbsp MB

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Since I ve already been where you are right now  I think I can  answer  you   The fact is there is no easy way to make a GUI  GUI s are highly dependent on platform and OS specific code  that s why you should start reading your target platform OS documentation on window management APIs  The good thing is  there are plenty of libraries that address these limitations and abstract architecture differences into a single multi-platform API  Those suggested before  GTK and Qt  are some of these libraries   But even these are a little too complicated  since lots of new concepts  data types  namespaces and classes are introduced  all at once  For this reason  they use to come bundled with some GUI WYSIWYG editor  They pretty much make programming software with GUIs possible   To sum it up  there are also non free  environments  for GUI development such as Visual Studio from Microsoft  For those with Delphi experience backgrounds  Visual Studio may be more familiar  There are also free alternatives to the full Visual Studio environment supplied from Microsoft  Visual Studio Express  which is more than enough for starting on GUI development

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