FLTK 1.4 Released
For those unfamiliar, FLTK is a cross-platform widget library in C++, with bindings to many other languages available. It's vaguely similar to something like Qt, but far simpler and far more developer-friendly. It is excellent; strongly recommended to all, for everything.
I'm a lurker here, never posted before :) This post brought back lots of memories. I wrote many small applications with FLTK; my favorite one is https://www.muquit.com/muquit/software/mbasecalc/mbasecalc.h.... I still use it today.
The default FLTK look and feel might be discouraging, but there are some really great native themes shipped for the Rust bindings: https://github.com/fltk-rs/fltk-theme?tab=readme-ov-file#wid...
This is fantastic. FLTK is great software and a very nice library to know. Now having wayland support and high dpi support, it will what people need in a more modern GUI library.
With previous versions you could get the pdf for all your documentation and start with a 100KB completely static binary that would show a window and buttons. The source is pretty clear so making your own components or modifying existing ones is straight forward and it really is lightweight and FAST.
It also has network stuff and jpg/png and audio libraries so checks off a few more potential dependencies. It has threading too, but that seems like less of a modern issue.
If someone was delivering software I would love it to use FLTK and be a single fast static binary. That's the kind of stuff that isn't a constant pain and can just work so you can move on to other problems.
xdiskusage is an FLTK program I use regularly. It's still one of my favorite ways to analyze disk usage. A nice feature is that it can take a du output file so it's easy use it with filtered du outputs, du runs from other machines or du-like output produced by other means.
I used Ruby/FLTK on a CD software installation script project almost exactly 20 years ago. Haven't used it since, but it worked out pretty well for that particular project given the small size and simplicity.
Congratulations! As a side note, there is a lightweight X Window Manager based on FLTK - FLWM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLWM)
Fltkhs [1] was the best ever experience I've had while doing small/auxiliary GUI utilities. Now using NWG [2] for that (UI forms examples [3]) and it is so much less elegant and so much more verbose than Fltkhs. Resulting lean EXEs without any bundled runtime are nice though.
[1] https://github.com/deech/fltkhs
[2] https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui
[3] https://github.com/wiltondb/wiltondb/wiki/WiltonDB-Data-Tran...
As a chemical engineer in the late 90's I used fltk to write a real-time photoresist film web inspection system. The first version in VB was too slow as the system used a laser to scan for defects in film going by at several hundred feet per minute. I was a novice C++ programmer and fltk was the only toolkit I could get my head around and came with a great UI builder (fluid). I even was able to write my own widgets. And all of this was running on a Celeron 300MHz system.
The mainline Dillo it's getting UTF8 improved support thanks to that release.
the website seems to have been receiving the hug of death from hackernews :(
snapshot from the wayback machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241118160735/https://www.fltk....
Any hints for a new developer where to start learning FLTK? I like older app aesthetics and interested to build a simple GUI app for personal use. And with Wayland support it looks like to be a more future proof library than say Tcl/Tk
I wonder how FLTK performs against imgui-based apps that have been popping up. I imagine anything being drawn directly on GPU is much faster that xlib shenanigans, specially with fonts.
Wayland finally!
The FLTK use case seems to overlap heavily with wxWidgets. Are there reasons to choose one over the other?
Zero accessibility =/
As great as it may be, this isn't something I'd pick as it'd be unusable in this cases.
It doesn't depend on OpenGL, does it?
Interesting bit of lore: FLTK was developed as a GUI toolkit to power Nuke, which at the time was the in-house high-end VFX compositing tool at Digital Domain. Nuke was then sold to The Foundry and its UI rewritten in Qt, but the legacy (in the form of FLTK) continues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_(software)