FLTK 1.4.5: Introduction to FLTK

FLTK 1.4.5

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Introduction to FLTK

The Fast Light Tool Kit ("FLTK") is a cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit for UNIX®/Linux® (X11 and Wayland), Microsoft® Windows®, and Apple® macOS®.

FLTK provides modern GUI functionality without bloat and supports 3D graphics via OpenGL® and its built-in GLUT emulation. It was originally developed by Mr. Bill Spitzak and is currently maintained by a small group of developers across the world with a central repository on GitHub.

# History of FLTK

It has always been Bill's belief that the GUI API of all modern systems is much too high level. Toolkits (even FLTK) are not what should be provided and documented as part of an operating system. The system only has to provide arbitrary shaped but featureless windows, a powerful set of graphics drawing calls, and a simple unalterable method of delivering events to the owners of the windows. NeXT (if you ignored NextStep) provided this, but they chose to hide it and tried to push their own baroque toolkit instead.

Many of the ideas in FLTK were developed on a NeXT (but not using NextStep) in 1987 in a C toolkit Bill called "views". Here he came up with passing events downward in the tree and having the handle routine return a value indicating whether it used the event, and the table-driven menus. In general he was trying to prove that complex UI ideas could be entirely implemented in a user space toolkit, with no knowledge or support by the system.

After going to film school for a few years, Bill worked at Sun Microsystems on the (doomed) NeWS project. Here he found an even better and cleaner windowing system, and he reimplemented "views" atop that. NeWS did have an unnecessarily complex method of delivering events which hurt it. But the designers did admit that perhaps the user could write just as good of a button as they could, and officially exposed the lower level interface.

With the death of NeWS Bill realized that he would have to live with X. The biggest problem with X is the "window manager", which means that the toolkit can no longer control the window borders or drag the window around.

At Digital Domain Bill discovered another toolkit, "Forms". Forms was similar to his work, but provided many more widgets, since it was used in many real applications, rather than as theoretical work. He decided to use Forms, except he integrated his table-driven menus into it. Several very large programs were created using this version of Forms.

The need to switch to OpenGL and GLX, portability, and a desire to use C++ subclassing required a rewrite of Forms. This produced the first version of FLTK. The conversion to C++ required so many changes it made it impossible to recompile any Forms objects. Since it was incompatible anyway, Bill decided to incorporate his older ideas as much as possible by simplifying the lower level interface and the event passing mechanism.

Bill received permission to release it for free on the Internet, with the GNU general public license. Response from Internet users indicated that the Linux market dwarfed the SGI and high-speed GL market, so he rewrote it to use X for all drawing, greatly speeding it up on these machines.

Digital Domain has since withdrawn support for FLTK. While Bill is no longer able to actively develop it, he still contributes to FLTK in his free time and is a part of the FLTK development team.

FLTK was later ported to Windows and macOS. FLTK 1.4 added a "driver based" system of virtual device drivers that enabled porting to Wayland as well. Drawing features include Windows GDI+, Cairo (Wayland and X11), and improved text layout with Pango.

There have been experiments using this driver system to build FLTK based on SDL2, Android, and other graphics systems based solely on simple pixel drawing, but this experimental code is not included in FLTK 1.4. There are thoughts to enable more platforms in later FLTK versions.

# Features

FLTK was designed to be statically linked. This was done by splitting it into many small objects and designing it so that functions that are not used do not have pointers to them in the parts that are used, and thus do not get linked in. This allows you to make an easy-to-install program or to modify FLTK to the exact requirements of your application without worrying about bloat. FLTK works fine as a shared library, though, and is now included with several Linux distributions.

Here are some of the core features unique to FLTK:

Note: sizes given below are mostly from 32-bit systems and FLTK 1.1 or earlier, this list needs updates for current FLTK (1.4).

- sizeof(Fl_Widget) == 64 to 92 (120 in FLTK 1.4 on 64-bit Linux).

- The "core" (the "hello" program compiled & linked with a static FLTK library using gcc on a 486 and then stripped) is 114K. (FLTK 1.4 on 64-bit Linux: 1.1 MB).

- The FLUID program (which includes every widget) is 538k. (FLTK 1.4 with more widgets on 64-bit Linux: 2.3 MB and 2.0 MB on 32-bit Windows).

- Written directly atop core libraries (Xlib, Wayland, Windows or Cocoa) for maximum speed, and carefully optimized for code size and performance.

- Precise low-level compatibility between the X11, Windows and MacOS versions - only about 10% of the code is different.

- Interactive user interface builder program FLUID. Its output is human-readable and editable C++ source code.

- Support for overlay hardware, with emulation if none is available.

- Very small & fast portable 2-D drawing library to hide Xlib, Cairo, Windows, or macOS Quartz.

- OpenGL/Mesa drawing area widget.

- Support for OpenGL overlay hardware on both X11 and Windows, with emulation if none is available.

- Text widgets with cut & paste, undo, and support for Unicode text and international input methods.

- Compatibility header file for the GLUT library.

- Compatibility header file for the XForms library.

# Licensing

FLTK comes with complete free source code. FLTK is available under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License with exceptions that allow for static linking. Contrary to popular belief, it can be used in commercial software - even Bill Gates could use it!

# What Does "FLTK" Mean?

FLTK was originally designed to be compatible with the Forms Library written for SGI machines. In that library all the functions and structures started with "fl_". This naming was extended to all new methods and widgets in the C++ library, and this prefix was taken as the name of the library. It is almost impossible to search for "FL" on the Internet, due to the fact that it is also the abbreviation for Florida. After much debating and searching for a new name for the toolkit, which was already in use by several people, Bill came up with "FLTK", including a bogus excuse that it stands for "The Fast Light Toolkit".

# FLUID

FLTK comes bundled with FLUID. FLUID, short for Fast Light User Interface Designer, is a graphical editor capable of generating C++ source code and header files ready for compilation. These files ultimately create the graphical user interface for an application.

The FLUID User Handbook is available at https://www.fltk.org/documentation.php . It can also be compiled from the FLTK source repository using the fluid_docs target in the CMake build environment.

# Building and Installing FLTK with CMake

Starting with version 1.4, the recommended FLTK building system is CMake. CMake is a "Build System Generator" that can generate build environments for usage with Ninja, Make, and many more, for instance IDE's. See file README.CMake.txt of the FLTK source tree for more information.

Note
  In FLTK 1.4 you can also use `configure` and `make` as follows to build and install FLTK. However, configure/make support will be dropped in FLTK 1.5.0.

# Building and Installing FLTK Under UNIX and macOS with make

In most cases you can just type "make". This will run configure with the default of no options and then compile everything.

FLTK uses GNU autoconf to configure itself for your UNIX platform. The main things that the configure script will look for are the X11 and OpenGL (or Mesa) header and library files. If these cannot be found in the standard include/library locations you'll need to define the `CFLAGS`, `CXXFLAGS`, and `LDFLAGS` environment variables. For the Bourne and Korn shells you'd use:

CFLAGS=-Iincludedir; export CFLAGS
CXXFLAGS=-Iincludedir; export CXXFLAGS
LDFLAGS=-Llibdir; export LDFLAGS

For C shell and tcsh, use:

setenv CFLAGS "-Iincludedir"
setenv CXXFLAGS "-Iincludedir"
setenv LDFLAGS "-Llibdir"

By default configure will look for a C++ compiler named `CC`, `c++`, `g++`, or `gcc` in that order. To use another compiler you need to set the `CXX` environment variable:

CXX=xlC; export CXX
setenv CXX "xlC"

The `CC` environment variable can also be used to override the default C compiler (`cc` or `gcc`), which is used for a few FLTK source files.

You can run configure yourself to get the exact setup you need. Type "./configure <options>", where some of the options are:

–enable-cygwin
  Enable the Cygwin libraries under Windows

–enable-debug
  Enable debugging code & symbols

–disable-gl
  Disable OpenGL support

–disable-svg
  Disable support of reading and writing of Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg) files.

–disable-print
  Disable print support for an X11/Wayland platform

–enable-shared
  Enable generation of shared libraries

–enable-threads
  Enable multithreading support

–enable-wayland
  This is the default for Linux and FreeBSD systems equipped with the Wayland software. Enable the use of Wayland for all window operations, of Cairo for all graphics, and of Pango for text drawing. Resulting FLTK apps run as Wayland clients if a Wayland compositor is available at run-time, and as X11 clients otherwise but keep using Cairo and Pango for all graphics.

–disable-xft
  Disables the Xft library, resulting in non anti-aliased fonts (X11 platform). This is not recommended.

–enable-usecairo
  All drawing operations use the Cairo library (rather than Xlib) producing antialiased graphics (X11 platform, implies –enable-pango).

–enable-pango
  Enable the Pango library for drawing any text in any script with any font under X11/Wayland.

–enable-x11
  When targeting Cygwin, build with X11 GUI instead of windows GDI. Also applicable to macOS platforms supplemented with XQuartz.

–enable-cairo
  Enable support of class Fl_Cairo_Window (all platforms, requires Cairo as an external library).

–enable-cairoext
  Enable the FLTK instrumentation for cairo extended use (implies –enable-cairo).

–disable-gdiplus
  Don't use GDI+ when drawing curves and oblique lines (Windows platform).

–enable-cp936
  Under X11, enable use of the GB2312 locale.

–bindir=/path
  Set the location for executables. [default = $prefix/bin]

–datadir=/path
  Set the location for data files. [default = $prefix/share]

–libdir=/path
  Set the location for libraries. [default = $prefix/lib]

–includedir=/path
  Set the location for include files. [default = $prefix/include]

–mandir=/path
  Set the location for man pages. [default = $prefix/man]

–prefix=/dir
  Set the directory prefix for files. [default = /usr/local]

When the configure script is done you can just run the "make" command. This will build the library, FLUID tool, fltk-options (setup tool), and all of the test programs.

To install the library, become root and type "make install". This will copy the "fluid" executable to "bindir", the header files to "includedir", and the library files to "libdir".

# Building FLTK Under Microsoft Windows

NOTE: This documentation section is currently under review. More up-to-date information for this release may be available in the files "README.Windows.txt" and "README.CMake.txt" and you should read these files to determine if there are changes that may be applicable to your build environment.

FLTK 1.4 is officially supported on Windows (2000,) 2003, XP, and later. Older Windows versions prior to Windows 2000 are not officially supported but may still work. The main reason is that the OS version needs to support UTF-8. FLTK 1.4 is known to work on recent versions of Windows such as Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10 and Windows 11, and has been reported to work in both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions.

Note
  Libraries built by any one of the following build environments can not be mixed with object files from any of the other environments because they use incompatible C++ conventions internally.

FLTK currently supports the following development environments on the Windows platform:

## Free and Commercial Microsoft Visual Studio Versions

Visual Studio 2015 Community or later versions use workspace and project files generated by CMake. Older versions and the commercial versions can be used as well, if they can open the project files generated by CMake. FLTK support of Visual C++ is limited to the support of CMake for these Visual Studio versions. Be sure to get your service packs!

Since FLTK 1.4 the project files MUST be generated with CMake. Please read "README.CMake.txt" for more information about this.

## Using the Visual C++ DLL Library

The Visual Studio project files can be used to build a DLL version of the FLTK library if CMake option 'FLTK_BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON' is set. Because of name mangling differences between PC compilers (even between different versions of Visual Studio) you can only use the DLL that is generated with the same compiler version that you built it with.

When compiling an application or DLL that uses the FLTK DLL with Visual Studio, you need to define the `FL_DLL` preprocessor symbol to get the correct linkage commands embedded within the FLTK header files.

New since FLTK 1.4.0: If you build your application project with CMake and use the CMake target 'fltk::fltk-shared' to link your application, then 'FL_DLL' is defined automatically for you (by CMake Compile Definition). If you use your own (hand-made) Visual Studio project you still need to define FL_DLL to compile all source files that use FLTK headers.

## GNU toolsets (Cygwin or MinGW) hosted on Windows

If using Cygwin with the Cygwin shell, or MinGW with the Msys shell, these build environments behave very much like a Unix or macOS build and the notes above in the section on Building and Installing FLTK Under UNIX and Apple macOS apply, in particular the descriptions of using the "configure" script and its related options.

In general for a build using these tools, e.g. for the Msys shell with MinGW, it should suffice to "cd" into the directory where you have extracted the FLTK tarball and type:

./configure
make

This will build the FLTK libraries and they can then be utilised directly from the build location. NOTE: this may be simpler than "installing" them in many cases as different tool chains on Windows have different ideas about where the files should be "installed" to.

For example, if you "install" the libraries using Msys/MinGW with the following command

make install

then Msys will "install" the libraries to where it thinks the path "/usr/local/" leads to. If you only ever build code from within the Msys environment this works well, but the actual "Windows path" these files are located in will be something like "C:\msys\1.0\local\lib", depending on where your Msys installation is rooted, which may not be useful to other tools.

If you want to install your built FLTK libraries in a non-standard location you may do:

sh configure --prefix=C:/FLTK
make

Where the value passed to "prefix" is the path at which you would like FLTK to be installed.

A subsequent invocation of "make install" will then place the FLTK libraries and header files into that path.

The other options to "configure" may also be used to tailor the build to suit your environment.

# Internet Resources

FLTK is available on the 'net in a bunch of locations:

FLTK Source Repository on GitHub
  https://github.com/fltk/fltk

WWW
  https://www.fltk.org/
  https://www.fltk.org/bugs.php [for reporting bugs]
  https://www.fltk.org/software.php [download source code]
  https://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php [newsgroup/forums]

User Forums and NNTP Newsgroups
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fltkgeneral [Google Groups interface]
  news://fltk.org:1024/ [NNTP interface]
  https://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php [web interface]

# Reporting Bugs

To report a bug in FLTK, or for feature requests, please use https://www.fltk.org/bugs.php for information about where and how to post bugs, feature requests, or ask for help on using FLTK.

For general support and questions, please use the fltk.general newsgroup (see above, "NNTP Newsgroups") or the web interface to the newsgroups at https://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php.

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