[fpc-pascal] which GUI (noob)

Graeme Geldenhuys mailinglists at geldenhuys.co.uk
Tue Aug 4 12:42:31 CEST 2015


On 2015-08-04 11:05, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Graeme, could you update us on the extent to which Lazarus or an 
> equivalent IDE supports form design etc. for fpGUI these days?

I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but I'll try answering it.
fpGUI was design so it doesn't dictate what development tools you need
to use to work with it. For that reason the tools included with fpGUI
are stand-alone tools. So you can use the UIDesigner (fpGUI Forms
Designer) (or DocView) as stand-alone from a desktop icon or command
line, or integrate it with any IDE or Editor that support "external
tools" functionality.

eg: I develop fpGUI applications with both Lazarus IDE and MSEide. In
both cases I have setup context sensitive help (via F1 key press) which
launches DocView and displays the appropriate help based on the cursor
position. The same is done with the UIDesigner, where I launch the form
designer and load the current file using the Ctrl+Shift+F12 shortcut
because both Lazarus IDE and MSEide hard-codes F12 (or used too) for its
own usage.

I've done the same with my favourite text editor, EditPad Pro.

Here is some instructions on how to set this up using Lazarus, MSEide,
Delphi 7 and EditPad Pro.

  http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml


Even using fpGUI's UIDesigner is optional, but it does make the process
of designing a form faster. The UIDesigner generates pure Object Pascal
code, as if a human typed it. It doesn't use external *.lfm or *.dfm
files, so the true full change history is easily seen in a code
repository. This also has some other benefits like supporting multiple
forms in a single *.pas unit, properties can quickly be changed directly
in code (without needing to launch the Forms Designer), Searching for
properties or even Search & Replace can be done on code, widgets or
properties.

I hope this answers your question.


Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/



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