Re: fljed

[Marko Mahnic <marko.mahnic@xxxxxxxx>]

Brian Blais wrote:
> Hello Marko,
>
> The fljed looks great, and I am looking forward to the Linux version.  I 
> have a couple of questions, specificially related to fltk, if you have a 
> moment.
>
> 1) when I did a very small fltk project recently, someone asked why I 
> didn't use the wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/).  My answer was 
> that fltk was the first thing I learned.  Do you know of any advantages? 
>  What is the reason you used it?

Most of all, I wanted to try something new. I did a lot of programming
under MFC so wxWidgets would be the logical choice for me.

The advantage of FLTK is that is very light. The exe statically linked to
FLTK is not much bigger than bare JED or wjed.  It is very easy to
define the basic interface with it, just a few lines of code. To achieve
the same result with MFC (and probably with wxWidgets) it would take much
more time and effort.

Also the keycodes returned by FLTK (one of the most important features
of JED) are more or less the same as the ones returned by xterm.

I do not know how UTF-is 8 supported in wxWidgets. In FLTK 2.0 every
string passed to the widgets is treated as UTF-8 and when you press
a key you already have the UTF-8 code available.

For bigger projects with a lot of GUI elements, FLTK might not be
the best choice. It uses a lot of static variables, and to change
the widget behaviour it uses callbacks - plain C functions that take
void pointers to pass additional parameters. Virtual functions are rare.
Also you can not allways be sure that something you allocated and passed
to the toolkit will be freed in the destructor.
(FL-Jed is probably full of memory leaks because of the FLTK menu system -
I still have to make some cheks).

> 2) What compiler do you use under windows for this?  Is it gcc under 
> cygwin, or something else, because I wanted to port my project to 
> windows but was having some problems getting fltk compiled.
I use DevCpp which uses mingw. The .dev file and the makefile for
FL-Jed are in the archive.

Beware when using mingw. The best way to use it is with the MSYS envoironment
and the MSYS-Devel package. (http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml)

The make program under MINGW does not work well with the makefiles for FLTK.
It uses paths like "C:\devel\...".

The make program provided by MSYS-Devel package has no problems.
It uses paths like "/c/devel/" that are more "makefile friendly".
Use the SH shell provided by MSYS to run make.

If you compile from the commandline then use the MSYS make.
If you use the DevCpp environment it will run the mingw make.

If you have DevCpp installed an you want to use MSYS it is a
good idea to install a separate MINGW instalation to be used by
MSYS. I had quite a few problems when I configured MSYS to use
the MINGW package that comes with DevCpp: the wrong version
of make was invoked from the command line.

Marko


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