making console programs into gui?

[stepan]

Hi guys. I am thinking of getting into linux programming and as a start , i want to know how you could maybe turn console program into a gui ?

[eriefisher]

Re: making console programs into gui?

The console is the "gui". Most of the programs you run in it have gui alternatives.

[askrieger]

Re: making console programs into gui?

To paraphrase Eriefisher's comment. Many of the GUI programs in linux (and in windoze as well) consist of two (or more) separable parts. One is the actual guts of the program. The code that actually does the work of actually manipulating data. The other is the user interface. The code that displays the result on your screen. It is "Good Programming Practice"(TM) to separate the internals from the user interface.

The next step which is frequent in Linux and other Unix based operating systems like Mac OS-X, (*)BSD, and Solaris is to simply use one or more command line programs to perform the actual work and to provide a GUI "wrapper" that simply converts checkboxes, buttons, sliders, and text entry areas into commands for the CLI backend. In addition, desktop environments like KDE and Gnome provide a set of uniform "widgets" in "toolkits" called Qt (for KDE) and GTK (for Gnome) so that all the programs written for a particular "environment" have a similar look and feel.

How to learn? I suggest that you take a course or two in GUI programming. There are some modes of thought that I, at least, had to hear explained more than once, after I had read about them, before I "got" them. Alternatively, you can read one or more books like C++ GUI Programming with QT4 by Blanchette and Summerfield, (I enjoyed the QT3 version) or Programming in Qt by Dalheimer. I don't know whether there is a QT4 edition of the Dalheimer book.