Hello I am looking to create a gui for a program written in c in Linux what are the good and free toolkits are out there that are used to create a gui in linux Please help

The main three off the top of my head are wxWidgets, GTK+, and Qt.

Each of them are fairly different, and have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. wxWidgets and GTK+ are both LGPL but Qt has its own license. I believe Qt is free to use in non-commercial applications, but you have to buy a license in order to sell an application using Qt - you'd need to read up on that if it's relevant to you.

wxWidgets also compiles down to the "native" toolkit - that means GTK+ (or even Motif if you like) on linux, and win32 on windows and whichever mac toolkit it uses. The advantage of this is that unlike GTK+ and Qt, and for example Swing for java, your apps don't look out of place on each different platform.

As a side note GTK+ is the toolkit used in GNOME and Qt used in KDE, so if you are aiming your app at either one, that might affect your decision.

For coding interface, it's obviously a matter of personal preference. You should look at each one to see which you prefer. Qt if I remember is OO based, but doesn't enforce a lot of constraints on how its used. I'm going on a fuzzy memory so you should probably check yourself, but I remember you simply having to declare objects, and call their methods. wxWidgets is also OO based but generally you code by writing your own classes to derive from standard classes and implement your own functionality - ie. its harder to decouple your own code from that of wxWidgets. This might have changed though since I last used it. GTK+ is functional so it is entirely based on calling functions with objects, C-style.

In the end the differences mostly reflect on what you want out of it - none of them has a particularly large advantage over the other.

If you're looking for a C toolkit, then Gtk+ and Motif are what you're looking for. I'd go with Gtk+ over Motif any time of the day, but if you want to use Motif, there's a free/open source (FOSS) implementation called LessTif. Gtk+ is FOSS as well.

Quote:Original post by Sander
Qt is licensed under the GPL, which means you can only link to it if your app is under the GPL as well. If you don't want to use the GPL yourself you'll have to buy a commercial Qt license.

As for the GTK/Gnome and Qt/KDE split, Qt apps run fine on Gnome and GTK apps fine on KDE. Most people have both toolkits installed. That said, using the native platform toolkit for the app in question makes thing just slightly easier.

Personally I prefer GTK/Gnome but that's mainly because of the Glade UI constructor.

I meant more for style - if you're wanting your app to fit in with KDE, don't use GTK+ :).

There are also plenty of UI constructors and RAD tools available for wxWidgets, and probably Qt too.

Another option if you like Gtk+ but want to code in C++ is GFC.

I REALLY like using The Fox Toolkit. It gets updated a lot, is open source...as far as I remember and is very comprehensive. It is also platform independent (Or at least it works on XP, Linux and a bunch of others fairly well).

www.fox-toolkit.net/

Thanks a lot for all the info guys.

I use Gnome/Ubuntu So, I think I will go for Glade/GTK+

I havent used or created GUI in Linux environment before, so I am very excited about this :-)

Regards