Thought I'd make my own thread too

I've learned a bit of C recently, and I can make a command-line program, but I can't seem to find any clear tutorials on making an app with a GUI. How do I make one? I saw a lot of tutorials on something called OpenGL, is that it?

Thanks for any help!

There's a bunch of different ways to make a program with a GUI. OpenGL is probably not the correct way to do it, since OpenGL is more a graphics library (think windowed game). The "easy", compromise solution would be to give NCurses a try, which lets you create text-based GUIs that are actually quite nifty. As far as true GUIs, GTK and QT are the reigning cross-platform technologies if you care about running your program in Linux, or you can use the Windows API if you're purely coding for Windows.

I would definite suggest ncurses, like Kerm said. It's not going to give you the pretty windows you get with something like GTK or QT, but it's a lot of fun, and pretty simple to get going.

Thanks for the tips. ncurses is for terminal-based graphics, right? I'll try that.

Here's a demo of ncurses in action, my own SysMon v1.0 project from a year or two ago. The source is included, if I recall correctly, so you can hopefully learn a bit by staring at the source code.

Qt is for C++, and is absolutely *amazing*. An absolutely fantastic API.

GTK is for C and, like most things in C, it is a big ugly hack. But if you want a powerful C GUI library that is cross platform (or runs on Linux), GTK is the best.

What's big, ugly, and hackish about GTK, Kllrnohj? I've never had a personal chance to use it, fortunately or unfortunately.

There's the typical C hack of using structs as a poor man's class. GUIs are one of those things that fit OOP perfectly, so using one from a non-OOP language is just annoying. Then there's things like using strings for events like this:


Code:

Ooooh, I actually have messed around with that stuff before, but only for the most rudimentary control over windows for my thesis. Yeah, it was fairly ugly if I recall, though functional.