blog/posts/2013-03-26-starting-with-gtk-programming.markdown

---
author: Sanchayan Maity
title: Starting with GTK+ Programming
tags: gtk, linux
---

<p style='text-align: justify;'>It's been a while since my last post in January. I shifted to Bangalore for work and took some time to get used to the new work environment and schedule. Anyways, let's get on with the topic at hand.</p>

<p style='text-align: justify;'>My current work involves a lot of GUI development on WinCE in C# and since I wanted to work on Linux, it left much to be desired. So, I thought why not do some GUI development on Linux. I could have opted for Qt and an Integrated Development Environment does speed up the work a lot and though developing GUI applications is a breeze in C#/QT with an IDE, I don't like GUI development and it becomes boring if things become too simple, like it happened with C#. So, I chose GTK+ for this task and Nano as the editor of my choice on my new Arch Linux installation to amuse myself and keep myself from getting bored.</p>

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Also, on a different note, I recently tried my hands on Gentoo. For any package installation, having to download the source, compile the package and then install, turned me off it. Actually, I have wanted to contribute to the open source community for a while, and this [http://blog.dastergon.gr/get-involved-in-gentoo-linux/](http://blog.dastergon.gr/get-involved-in-gentoo-linux/) motivated me to go ahead with Gentoo, but, I was put off by the package management. I will stick with Arch.</p>

I am using Xfce as my desktop environment in Arch Linux. At first, I was worried about having to take care of package installation and dependencies for starting with GTK programming, but, I think during the Xfce installation or something else this was taken care of.

First I just typed the below program in the Nano editor.

```c
#include <gtk/gtk.h>

static void hello( GtkWidget *widget, gpointer data )
{
    g_print ("Hello World\n");
}

static gboolean delete_event( GtkWidget *widget, GdkEvent *event, gpointer data )
{
    g_print ("Delete event occurred\n");

    return FALSE;
}

static void destroy( GtkWidget *widget, gpointer data )
{
    gtk_main_quit ();
}

int main( int argc, char *argv[] )
{
    GtkWidget *window;
    GtkWidget *button;

    gtk_init (&argc, &argv);

    window = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);

    g_signal_connect (window, "delete-event", G_CALLBACK (delete_event), NULL);

    g_signal_connect (window, "destroy", G_CALLBACK (destroy), NULL);

    gtk_container_set_border_width (GTK_CONTAINER (window), 10);

    button = gtk_button_new_with_label ("Hello World");

    g_signal_connect (button, "clicked", G_CALLBACK (hello), NULL);

    g_signal_connect_swapped (button, "clicked", G_CALLBACK (gtk_widget_destroy), window);

    gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (window), button);

    gtk_widget_show (button);

    gtk_widget_show (window);

    gtk_main ();

    return 0;
}
```

You can compile the above code by typing the following on command line.

```c
gcc -o hello hello.c `pkg-config --libs --cflags gtk+-2.0`
```

After compilation, run the output file generated and see the output. I did not intend much with this tutorial, but, just wanted to share. This post is more sort of an incoherent musing and working on GUI's is boring and I can't make head or tails of how to make good user interfaces.

You can find a detail tutorial and explanation of various functions, API's and callbacks on the GNOME development center below.

[https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-tutorial/2.24/book1.html](https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-tutorial/2.24/book1.html).

I hope to put up some articles soon on PCB design, which I have been putting off and some other stuff related to programming may be.