On 2015-08-04 11:05, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: > Graeme, could you update us on the extent to which Lazarus or an > equivalent IDE supports form design etc. for fpGUI these days?
I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but I'll try answering it. fpGUI was design so it doesn't dictate what development tools you need to use to work with it. For that reason the tools included with fpGUI are stand-alone tools. So you can use the UIDesigner (fpGUI Forms Designer) (or DocView) as stand-alone from a desktop icon or command line, or integrate it with any IDE or Editor that support "external tools" functionality. eg: I develop fpGUI applications with both Lazarus IDE and MSEide. In both cases I have setup context sensitive help (via F1 key press) which launches DocView and displays the appropriate help based on the cursor position. The same is done with the UIDesigner, where I launch the form designer and load the current file using the Ctrl+Shift+F12 shortcut because both Lazarus IDE and MSEide hard-codes F12 (or used too) for its own usage. I've done the same with my favourite text editor, EditPad Pro. Here is some instructions on how to set this up using Lazarus, MSEide, Delphi 7 and EditPad Pro. http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml Even using fpGUI's UIDesigner is optional, but it does make the process of designing a form faster. The UIDesigner generates pure Object Pascal code, as if a human typed it. It doesn't use external *.lfm or *.dfm files, so the true full change history is easily seen in a code repository. This also has some other benefits like supporting multiple forms in a single *.pas unit, properties can quickly be changed directly in code (without needing to launch the Forms Designer), Searching for properties or even Search & Replace can be done on code, widgets or properties. I hope this answers your question. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal