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Programming outside the command prompt
Okay, so I've been working on my programming a lot lately and feel like all my work is being wasted on only having my code come only get built and ran in the command prompt. Is there a way for me to use my IDE (Code::Blocks) and have an executable kind of how you have google chrome or such? I feel like that would give myself a little more inspiration to move my c++ along! Thanks for any input in advance!
Yes. What you're looking for is a GUI library.
Programming for GUI is not really much harder than programming for the console, but it takes a bit of time to get started – it's a very different kind of programming.
There are a bunch of ways that you can do it. A very common and popular GUI library is Qt, a cross-platform toolkit based around signals and slots which does pretty much everything. If you want to use it, I recommend using QtCreator (their IDE); it's a bit of a pain trying to set it up with anything else.
Another library which used to be quite popular (I haven't heard much about it recently, though) is wxWidgets, which is incidentally the library that Code::Blocks is created with. From memory it's quite ugly, with macros everywhere, but it is also cross-platform.
If you are on Windows, there's also the WinAPI; the programming interface that Windows exposes for creating GUI applications. It's a C interface, so it's very different to how you (should) have been programming, but there is heaps of documentation for it all over the place. After all, lots of the API hasn't changed very much in 15 years or so, though lots of it has been deprecated in favour of newer ways of doing things.
If you're more interested in creating windowed programs that aren't 'standard' GUI applications, like games or things, SFML is a good choice. If you're more interested in low-level graphics things, something like OpenGL is a good bet, or the recent Vulcan standard if you're ambitious (there's not much documentation for Vulcan for entry-level programmers out there, as far as I can see).
Does that help?
Programming for GUI is not really much harder than programming for the console, but it takes a bit of time to get started – it's a very different kind of programming.
There are a bunch of ways that you can do it. A very common and popular GUI library is Qt, a cross-platform toolkit based around signals and slots which does pretty much everything. If you want to use it, I recommend using QtCreator (their IDE); it's a bit of a pain trying to set it up with anything else.
Another library which used to be quite popular (I haven't heard much about it recently, though) is wxWidgets, which is incidentally the library that Code::Blocks is created with. From memory it's quite ugly, with macros everywhere, but it is also cross-platform.
If you are on Windows, there's also the WinAPI; the programming interface that Windows exposes for creating GUI applications. It's a C interface, so it's very different to how you (should) have been programming, but there is heaps of documentation for it all over the place. After all, lots of the API hasn't changed very much in 15 years or so, though lots of it has been deprecated in favour of newer ways of doing things.
If you're more interested in creating windowed programs that aren't 'standard' GUI applications, like games or things, SFML is a good choice. If you're more interested in low-level graphics things, something like OpenGL is a good bet, or the recent Vulcan standard if you're ambitious (there's not much documentation for Vulcan for entry-level programmers out there, as far as I can see).
Does that help?
Wow, I didn't expect anyone to give me so much information! But I always though a GUI is for making games? Anyways I'll look into it. Thank you so very much for all the information!!
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