this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
62 points (95.6% liked)

Programming

24083 readers
131 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

There are some times that I make something and the terminal isn't enough. I want to make it user-friendly and add buttons and dropdowns and stuff. I mainly write C, so I want a well-known and good GUI library for C. I have tried learning Qt but the documentation was awful and all the examples were for C++ or Python. I also am aware about libraries like imgui but it's more for debugging UIs I think and not for normal applications that end users use.

I also would like the library to be platform-agnostic, or at least just work with Linux because that's what I am using.

If you also code in C, what do you use to make GUIs? What do you suggest me to use?

Thanks in advance.

Also, if anyone suggests Electron or anything involving a browser, I will find them and remove one electron from each atom of theirs, turning them into smoke.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Thorry@feddit.org 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm going to have to second the Qt documentation assessment. They have very good documentation and there's also a lot of books available about Qt. I always prefer a good book as opposed to online docs. But I learned to program before the internet was a thing, so reading books for documentation was the norm for me for a long time.

[โ€“] ulterno@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I find it really hard to relate to people not liking Qt Documentation.
Specially if you use qtcreator, you get to simply F1 any Qt class and you are sent straight to the documentation specific to that thingy.

Then there are cases where on top of normally telling what a function does, the docs also give an idea about the performance considerations, other than just the space/time complexity.

Granted there are some gaps when doing more advanced things like sub-classing an item-delegate, but:

  • When sub-classing a class, you are expected to do more than just read the docs
  • There are really good examples that more than fill that gap.

Of course, if you just want to download an older version of Qt, like 5.14 and use QML with it, you are in for a task.

Also, you are expected to understand C++ concepts before starting Qt, because that's not what its docs are intended to teach you.

P.S.: a lot of the phrases are intended for those who found the Qt Docs "awful"