Tools to use with wxWidgets

IDEs and Dialog Editors | Editors/Viewers | Debugging | Other

See also Contributions for a list of wxWidgets-related tools.


Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and Dialog Editors

wxDesigner
wxDesigner is a commercial tool written to make creating dialogs for wxWidgets based programs easy and fast. Its interface allows anyone somewhat familiar with wxWidgets to create aesthetically pleasant and cross-platform dialogs in a matter of minutes. Higher-level features such as supporting copy/cut/paste, infinite undo/redo and previewing make quick testing easy and safe. Additionally, all dialogs can be used in both C++ and Python making co-development easier than ever.

DialogBlocks
DialogBlocks is an easy-to-use, commercial dialog editor for wxWidgets from Anthemion Software Ltd. It supports C++ and XRC, with the option to generate appropriate C++ classes to load the XRC. Supports most core wxWidgets widgets including wxSplitterWindow; allows image import and conversion to XPM; and registered users get ImageBlocks, a simple image conversion utility. Available for Windows and Linux.

XRCed
XRCed is a dialog editor and XRC resource generator, written using wxPython. Currently it is only available from wxWidgets CVS under wxPython/tools, but some releases will be available from the XRCed web site from time to time.

wxGlade
wxGlade is a GUI designer written in Python with the popular GUI toolkit wxPython, that helps you create wxWidgets/wxPython user interfaces. It can generate Python, Perl, C++ and XRC (wxWidgets XML resources) code.

Dev-C++
Windows IDE with Mingw32 built in -- works well with wxWidgets. Please see Using Dev-C++ with wxWidgets for more details.

wx-devcpp
Guru Kathiresan's wxWidgets form designer plugin for Dev-C++.

Code::Blocks
Code::Blocks is a free C++ IDE based on wxWidgets. Built with a plugin framework, it was designed to be extensible and configurable. Its features are: Multiple compiler support (GCC, MSVC, BCC and others), support for workspaces, imports Dev-C++ and MS Visual C++ Projects, code folding and syntax highlighting, code completion and class browser, and more. Includes a plugin wizard so you can make your own plugins. Note: CodeBlocks is in no way related to Julian Smart or Anthemion Software's DialogBlocks.

Eclipse
Eclipse with the CDT C++ plugin can be used for wxWidgets development.

MinGW Developer Studio
MinGW Developer Studio is a simple C/C++ IDE for MinGW, written using wxWidgets and MinGW. It uses GNU C/C++ compiler and GNU gdb.

Chinook Developer Studio
Chinook Developer Studio Free is a multi-platform C/C++ integrated development environment. Chinook provides a consistent environment across all platforms which enables developers to quickly build, test and deliver high performance applications. Chinook was built with and supports wxWidgets.

See also a tutorial by Klaus-Dieter Landwehr about programming wxWidgets with Chinook.

wxVisualSetup
Provides wxWidgets integration features for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net: a project wizard, Intellisense, online help, dynamic help (browse help while you are typing), and tips and tricks. wxVisualSetup is a commercial product by Hajo Kirchhoff.

KDevelop
The KDevelop IDE will have a wizard for creating wxWidgets applications from version 3.0.

wxHatch
A code generator for wxWidgets. This program is intended as a GUI building block to put together basic wxWidgets applications, with the ability to incorporate menus, dialogs, code samples and to provide a rapid means to locate the related code. By Chris Elliott.

VisualWx
A visual forms designer for wxWidgets.

Jumli
Jumli is a new IDE. With Jumli you get a tool that contains a graphical UML-Editor as well as a sourcecode-editor for Java, C# and C++. Jumli allows you to design UML-Diagrams (e.g. Use-Case-Diagram, Class-Diagram, Activity-Diagram, Sequence-Diagram, Collaboration-Diagram etc.) and to generate sourcecode out of this models. In addition to that Jumli also features an integrated sourcecode analyzer which makes roundtrip engeneering possible. It has been ported from MFC to wxWidgets.

wxWinWiz
A VC++ project wizard to create skeleton wxWidgets application files. This is a VC++ wizard rather than a standalone application. By Bill Nalen, updating the original version by Gregory Silber. Now works with wxWidgets 2.3.3 and above. April 2004: now updated for VS.NET 2003.

SlickEdit
An IDE for Linux.

CodeForge
An IDE for Linux.

Anjuta
An IDE for Linux.


Editors/Viewers

HelpView
Binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac for HelpView, a standalone help viewer for wxWidgets HTML Help files (extension HTB). HelpView's source can be found in utils/helpview/src in your wxWidgets distribution.

Documancer
Documancer is a programmer's documentation reader for Unix and Windows by Vaclav Slavik, with very fast fulltext searching. It has several advantages over using a web browser or specialized format-specific viewers (such as info): unified access to all documentation formats; the GUI is better suited for documentation reading than a generic web browser; documancer can create fulltext index for the docs and enables the user to quickly search it; bookmarks and indexes are manual-specific, which reduces false matches and chaos in bookmarks. Documancer is written with wxPython.

Try using HelpBlocks

HelpBlocks
A commercial HTML help authoring tool, available for Windows and Linux, by the creator of wxWidgets. HelpBlocks makes it easy to edit and preview HTML pages before conversion to wxWidgets HTML Help and MS HTML Help formats.

010 Hex Editor
A powerful Windows hex editor for parsing and debugging binary files.

IconEdit32
Excellent free icon editor for Windows, from pcmag.com.

TextPad
Good, solid shareware Windows editor.

Visual Assist
Commercial add-in for Visual C++ with enhanced IntelliSense, that can help with using any library including wxWidgets. Recommended by several wxWidgets users.


Debugging

mpatrol
This is an extensive memory debugging and stress-testing tool, showing memory allocation problems in detail and profiling memory (de)allocations to help track down inefficiencies. Works with most operating systems. For other memory debugging tools, see this list.

DebugView
Debug utility for Win95/Win98, to show debug messages without a debugger. This is recommended for wxWidgets 2.1.11 and above.

Audit
Counts Windows resources used (bitmaps, fonts, pens etc.)


Other

FreeGee
FreeGee is an integrated application framework of approved free Open Source software tools, that boosts developer's productivity at implementing platform-independent software in Python or C++. These tools are unified in this many-sided and easy-to-use distribution now: Python (easy OO scripting language), PostgreSQL (database), wxWidgets (GUI framework), GnuPG (Public-Key cryptography), omniORB (object-oriented middleware), Apache (web-server), and some convenient add-ons.

wxH2Help
Integrates wxWidgets 2.4 documentation into Visual Studio .NET 2002 and Visual Studio .NET 2003. By Thomas Kux.

H2Reg
A tool for integrating MS HTML Help into the Visual Studio .Net help system.

XML-RPC
A multi-platform library for programming distributed applications.

Bochs
Free x86 emulator to allow you to run one operating system within another (like VMware), albeit quite slowly. Bochs happens to have a wxWidgets front-end.

FirebirdSQL database
Free cross-platform database library derived from Interbase from Borland.

GUIgui
Theming library for sprucing up WIN32 applications.

RUST
Drag and drop RPM creation tool.

poEdit
Gettext (.po) catalogs editor, for helping you to give your wxWidgets international appeal.

Features:

  • User friendly way of editing entries. You can easily navigate in large catalogs, and easily enter or modify entries
  • Whitespaces highlighting
  • Fuzzy and untranslated records highlighting. Furthermore, untranslated and fuzzy translations are displayed at the top of the list
  • Automatic compilation of .mo files (optional)
  • Automatic headers update
  • References browser lets you see where in what context the string is used
  • You can use poEdit to scan source code for translatable strings

UPX
The ultimate executable packer, for reducing the size of your executables.

Tex2RTF
A tool for generating documents in a number of formats.

ODBC 2.5
Desktop Driver Pack 3.0, which installs ODBC 2.5 onto your PC. Required when programming ODBC applications.