So, in the past few weeks multiplatform GUI toolkits have been for me somewhat of an interest. On one hand they allow quick application development, at least the GUI part of that, and let the code flow better by avoiding clutter. On the other hand though most platforms seem unnecessarily complex and difficult to setup. The most known open multiplatform widgeting system is most likely WxWidgets. Among its friends are Qt and GTK, mostly used in heavier applications such as the KDE and Gnome desktop environments.

Now, I develop for windows. Effectively this restricts me a bit in the choice of framework as GTK doesn’t really work well under this OS, its environment of choice being linux. I find Qt way too heavy for the kind of applications I need to make, so that’s out too, although still a very good choice otherwise. WxWidgets, also formely known as WxWindows is still a bit big for my liking, weighting in excess of 4MB once compiled, but the main problem with it in my opinion lies in its kazillion of classes and stuff.. totally hard to maintain. There’s also no easy way to click-design.

Anyways, recently I’ve discovered another alternative to those three giants but designed with simplicity in mind and programmed in Pascal : MSEide+MSEgui. The IDE’s main form however lacks a button for ‘make and run’, allowing only a debug run of the currently opened project so I took the liberty to hack the source a bit and came up with :

The first icon R4 ( 🙂 ) means: Run Make4, the directive that tells FPC (free pascal compiler) to apply optimisations and ignore debug symbols. For some reason GDB kept crashing on my system so the normal ‘debug run’ button wasn’t really an option.

So, I managed to write some code with the toolkit after a few hours. Not bad at all !