Gfilui

I am doing development in C++. I heard that GTK is being replaced by Wayland.

Which GUI libraries are suitable for C++ for long-term?

Wayland is a replacement for X11. GTK+ is still the GUI toolkit used by GNOME and some other desktop environments and there are no plans to replace it.

The two big GUI libraries for Linux are Qt and GTK+. Both can be used with C++ and are likely to stay for the foreseeable future.

Which one is better for you depends on which desktop environment is your primary target. Both libraries can be used with any desktop environment but your app will have a different look and feel if it's using the "wrong" GUI toolkit for your desktop environment.

If you want your app to be used on other systems than Linux Qt is usually the better choice.

Glade

Although you can use C++ code to instantiate and arrange widgets, this can soon become tedious and repetitive. And it requires a recompilation to show changes. The Glade application allows you to layout widgets on screen and then save an XML description of the arrangement.

This has the following advantages:

• Less C++ code is required.


• UI changes can be seen more quickly, so UIs are able to improve.


• Designers without programming skills can create and edit UIs.

The user interfaces designed in Glade are stored in the well-known XML format, enabling easy integration with external tools. You will probably want to use it with tools such as libglade, which can load the XML files and create the interfaces at runtime.

To install Glade GTK+ User Interface Builder in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

sudo apt install glade 

To install only the development files for the GTK+ library without installing Glade type:

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev

Qt Creator

Qt Creator is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) designed to make development with the Qt application framework faster and easier.

It includes:

• An advanced C++ code editor


• Integrated GUI layout and forms designer


• Project and build management tools


• Integrated, context-sensitive help system


• Visual debugger


• Rapid code navigation tools


• Supports multiple platforms


• Qt Quick Designer

To install QT Creator in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

sudo apt install qtcreator 

$ apt-cache depends qtcreator | grep qt 
qtcreator 
 Depends: libqt5sql5-sqlite 
 Depends: qml-module-qtqml-models2 
 Depends: qml-module-qtquick-controls 
 Depends: qml-module-qtquick2 
 Depends: qtchooser 
 qtchooser:i386 
 Depends: qtcreator-data 
 Depends: libqbsqtprofilesetup1.10 
 Depends: libqt5concurrent5 
 Depends: libqt5core5a 
 Depends: libqt5designer5 
 Depends: libqt5designercomponents5 
 Depends: libqt5gui5 
 Depends: libqt5help5 
 Depends: libqt5network5 
 Depends: libqt5printsupport5 
 Depends: libqt5qml5 
 Depends: libqt5quick5 
 Depends: libqt5quickwidgets5 
 Depends: libqt5sql5 
 Depends: libqt5widgets5 
 Depends: libqt5xml5 
 Depends: <qtdeclarative-abi-5-9-5> 
 libqt5qml5 
 Recommends: qt5-doc 
 Recommends: qt5-qmltooling-plugins 
 Recommends: qtbase5-dev-tools 
 qtbase5-dev-tools:i386 
 Recommends: qtcreator-doc 
 Recommends: qtdeclarative5-dev-tools 
 qtdeclarative5-dev-tools:i386 
 Recommends: qttools5-dev-tools 
 qttools5-dev-tools:i386 
 Recommends: qttranslations5-l10n 
 Recommends: qtxmlpatterns5-dev-tools 
 qtxmlpatterns5-dev-tools:i386 
 qterminal

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