Hi all,

Perhaps a stupid question. Some time ago, I received a rpi zeroW as a gift, but as I did not have any use for ii I passed it to somebody else in our electronics-group. Now, that person has had a +30 year carreer as self-taught programmer -starting out with BASIC on DOS machines- so he showed of some of his old BASIC applications in dosbox on the pi.

So far so good, but he had an interesting question: Years ago, I wrote a library in BASIC for screen / window applications in DOS. (you know, pop-up text-windows and so on). How do I do that on linux (in C)?

As I myself only do ‘backend’ coding (so no UI), I have to admit I did not have any answer to that.

So, question, For somebody who has mostly coded in BASIC (first DOS and later Visual Basic) and now switched to C and python, what is the best / most easy tool to write a basic UI application with window-function on linux/unix. I know there exist things like QT and ncurses, but I never used these, so I have no idea.

Any advice?

Kr.

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    3·
    1 month ago

    Gambas is like VB6 but on the Linux desktop. For a simple tool, it’s easily my go-to.

    Linux GUI programming can be a bit of a pain. There are tons of frameworks and not very many expanded tutorials or books, at least compared to most GUIs.

    If I had to write a GUI today, I’d pick something like Flutter so that I get the benefits of mobile app developer tools (that are generally better IMO). I’m looking into Slint in my free time, but I don’t think that’s something that’d fit you.