And what to use as visual form designer then?
fpGUI includes everything you need as stand-alone tools. That way you can use any IDE (Lazarus, MSEgui, Geany, Delphi etc) or Programmer Editor to integrate the various fpGUI toolkits via the development environment's "External Tools" functionality.
fpGUI has its own Visual Forms Designer called
UI Designer and is located in the
<fpgui>/uidesigner/ directory. Simply Open the the project with Lazarus IDE and compile it. If Lazarus complains that in can't find the
fpgui_toolkit.lpk package, then simply select "Package
-> Open package file (.lpk)" and select the
fpgui_toolkit.lpk package found in the
<fpgui>/src/corelib/gdi/ directory.
This page on the fpGUI website has a screenshot of the UI Designer. It's an couple years old version, but it gives you an idea at least.
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/screenshots_apps.shtmlThat page also has a screenshot of fpGUI help viewer - DocView.
To integrate fpGUI's UIDesigner with Lazarus IDE, use the External Tools functionality of Lazarus. The steps is near identical to how you integrate fpGUI's DocView (help viewer) into Lazarus. Good news is, there is no need to recompile Lazarus IDE for any of this.
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtmlI've attached a screenshot of how I integrated UIDesigner with my Lazarus. I highlighted the important parts. Note: You can choose any keyboard shortcut that suits you.
Any link to a tutorial?
The
<fpgui>/docs/INSTALL.txt file explains many different ways of installing a fpGUI development environment - depending on what development environment you are using (Lazarus IDE, MSEide, Free Pascal's Text IDE etc).
The FPC Wiki also has some details:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/fpGUII'm also busy writing a "
A Quick Guide to using fpGUI Toolkit" book. I've got a few chapters done already. The book source (IPF file) can be found in the
<fpgui>/docs/quick_guide/ directory and can be compiled with
WIPFC into a binary INF file, which in turn can be viewed with
DocView (found in
<fpgui>/docview/ directory).
I just wanted to play around a little, just to see what it is and wether I like it or not.
So, I took the lazy way.
Unfortunately you chose the worst way to experience fpGUI. The LCL-fpGUI widgetset is missing many of the benefits of fpGUI, plus it has a lot less widgets than the "pure" fpGUI Toolkit includes.
B.t.w. I don't have a git client, I used the webinterface (one of the wiki links) and downloaded the zip file.
Needless to say I'm an ignorant w.r.t. git.
I highly recommend you install Git. More and more projects are using Git now, and even the console client (which I recommend) is very easy to use.
https://git-scm.com/downloads