The strengths of LGI is that it's a small enough library that one person can understand it all. Also it's not too much of a burden on an application, both in increased download time and memory footprint. LGI at the moment compresses to about 300kb, which while not insignificant is quite a bit smaller than the other options.

Ultimately however size is a secondary consideration to the core feature of LGI and that is portability. Currently 3 serious ports exist: Win32, Mac and Linux. There is also a legacy BeOS port which is unsupported.

I have completed some basic documentation (available online here) for the library, and there are a number of example apps with source code available from this site as well.

Related Information:

• Lgi on SourceForge
• LGI Configuration file format.
• Dmoz GUI libraries

• File system abstraction (GFile, GDirectory)
• Basic windows (GView, GWindow, GLayout, GDialog). GView is the base window class and handles all the basic window API calls and events. GView API looks like:

  virtual Events

  Properties (Get/Set)

  int OnEvent(GMessage *Msg); void OnMouseClick(GMouse &m); void OnMouseEnter(GMouse &m); void OnMouseExit(GMouse &m); void OnMouseMove(GMouse &m); void OnKey(GKey &k); void OnMouseWheel(double Lines); void OnCreate(); void OnDestroy(); void OnFocus(bool Has); void OnPulse(); void OnPosChange(); bool OnRequestClose(); int OnHitTest(int x, int y); int OnNotify(GView *Ctrl, int Flags); void OnChildrenChanged(GView *Wnd, bool Attaching); int OnCommand(int Cmd, int Event, OsView Wnd); void OnPaint(GSurface *pDC); bool OnViewKey(GView *v, GKey &k);

  char *Name(); int Value(); GRegion &GetPos(); int GetId(); bool Enabled(); bool Visible(); bool Focus(); bool DropTarget(); bool Sunken(); bool Flat(); bool Raised(); GView *GetParent(); GView *GetNotify(); bool Capture(bool c); // mouse capture

• Widgets (Most are XP - owner drawn)
  • GEdit - Edit control (Win32: Native, Linux: GTextView3)
  • GCheckBox - On/Off
  • GText - Label
  • GRadio/GRadioGroup - One of many.
  • GCombo - Combo box
  • GList - List control
  • GTree - Tree control
  • GBitmap - Bitmap
  • GProgress - Progress meter
  • GSlider - Slider control
  • GSplitter - Split 2 panes
  • GTabView - Tabbed control
  • GTextView3 - Unicode text editor.
  • GToolBox - Toolbar control.
  • GStatusBar - Status bar.
  • GMenu / GSubMenu / GMenuItem - Menu controls.
  • GPopup
• Internally all text is Utf-8
• Unicode font support (GFont, GFontType). Tools for converting to/from native OS text and other codepages are provided. iso-8859-x and windows-12xx codepage support is native, other codepages supported via the iconv library.
• Multi-threading (GThread, GSemaphore)
• Graphics library (GSurface, GMemDC, GScreenDC, GPrintDC)
  • Supports internally, all the basic primitives: Line, Circle, Rect, Blt, Flood, Polygon, Ellipse etc. No OS support required.
  • Bit depth conversion for bitmaps and colours.
  • Palette management.
  • Alpha blending.
  • Vector art library, anti-aliased rasterisation of primitives & text. Includes TTF -> path capability.
  • Graphic file format support (GIF, TIFF, JPEG(dll), PNG(dll), BMP, ICO).
• Recursive file search.
• Full file open/save dialog (ie. not from the OS libraries). There is also support for the Win32 file open/save dialog - API compatible.
• Mime type detection/app lookup API.
• Platform independant XML resource file format for strings, dialogs and menus. All fully multi-lingual. LgiRes is a graphical editor for this format.
• Cross-platform. Runs on Win32 (dep: '98 or better, may run on '95) and Linux/X11 (dep: xlib, pthreads, xrender). There is a legacy port to BeOS but that is unmaintained and won't work out of the box.
• Clipboard IO for text and bitmaps.
• Drag'n'drop events/API.
• Commonly used dialogs (GInput, MsgBox, GAlert, GFindReplace, GFileSelect).
• Date time handling (GDateTime). Date subtraction/addition, conversion to/from native format, conversion to/from strings.
• Container classes (List<>, StringPipe).
• Network abstraction (GNetwork, GSocket).
• Network protocol client classes:
  • FTP (IFtp)
  • HTTP (IHttp)
  • SMTP (MailSmtp)
  • POP (MailPop3)
  • IMAP (MailIMap)
  • DNS (IDns)
• Xml parser (GXml - being deprecated), XML DOM parser (GXmlTree).
• String tokenization (GToken);
• 192k packed/zipping redistributable, 268k installed (at the time of writing this).
• Simple HTML control. Support for charsets, CSS classes/styles, tables (colspan etc), Tags (p/ul/li/div/span/font/a/img/br/i/b/u/table/tr/td/meta/style).

sudo apt-get install subversion
sudo apt-get install g++
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
svn co https://lgi.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lgi Lgi
cd Lgi/trunk
ln -s Makefile.linux makefile
make

cd /usr/local/lib
sudo ln -s [install_path]/Lgi/trunk/DebugX/liblgid.so liblgid.so
sudo ln -s [install_path]/Lgi/trunk/ReleaseX/liblgi.so liblgi.so

; LGI types
GRegion =x1=<x1> y1=<y1> x2=<x2> y2=<y2>
GMessage =msg=<Msg,wm> a=<a> b=<b>
GDateTime =<_Year>/<_Month>/<_Day> <_Hours>:<_Minutes>:<_Seconds>