gform is an easy to use Windows GUI toolkit for Go

It provides two approaches to create UI.

1. Pure code.

gform.Init()

mainWindow := gform.NewForm(nil)
mainWindow.SetPos(300, 100)
mainWindow.SetSize(500, 300)
mainWindow.SetCaption("Controls Demo")

btn := gform.NewPushButton(mainWindow)
btn.SetPos(10, 10)
btn.OnLBUp().Bind(btn_onclick)

mainWindow.Show()

gform.RunMainLoop()

2. Create dialog in resource file and attach to it.

gform.Init()

dialog := gform.NewDialogFromResId(nil, 101) //101 is the resource Id.
dialog.Center()
dialog.Show()

edt = gform.AttachEdit(dialog, 1000)
edt.SetCaption("Hello")

btn := gform.AttachPushButton(dialog, 2)
btn.OnLBDown().Attach(onclick)

gform.RunMainLoop()

Event handling

gform provides two approaches to handle event. For most commonly used events, convenient event handler is introduced. To handle windows message directly, "Bind" mechanism is introduce.

1. Convenient event handler.

These kind of event handler follows the same naming convention, "OnSomething".

btn.OnLBUp().Bind(btn_onclick) //LB means Left Button.
btn.OnMBUp //MB means middle button
btn.OnKillFocus
btn.OnDropFiles
...

If you bind two methods for one event, the first bind will be overwritten by later bind. E.g.

btn.OnLBUp().Bind(btn_onclick1)
btn.OnLBUp().Bind(btn_onclick2)

Only "btn_onclick2" will be triggered.

You can also bind "nil" to a event handler, that simply means nothing will be triggered.

2. Raw windows message handler.

It's a common case that we need to handler various windows messages in GUI, and to wrap them all is basically "mission impossible" (and I don't think a GUI framework should do that frankly), so gform leaves the freedom to user. The "Bind" method could bind an event handler directly to a raw windows message. E.g.

btn.Bind(w32.WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATE, btn_onClipboardUpdate)

func btn_onClipboardUpdate(arg *EventArg) {
    sender := arg.Sender()
    if data, ok := arg.Data().(*gform.RawMsg); ok {
        println(data.Hwnd, data.Msg, data.WParam, data.LParam)
    }
}

The event handler uses the same method signature "func(arg *EventArg)", but a new struct named "RawMsg" will be filled to the "data" field of EventArg.

type RawMsg struct {
    Hwnd           w32.HWND
    Msg            uint
    WParam, LParam uintptr
} 

The same with convenient event handler, if you bind two methods for one event, the first bind will be overwritten by later bind. And bind "nil" to a message is allowed.

Setup

1. Make sure you have a working Go installation and build environment, see more for details from below page. http://golang.org/doc/install

2. go get github.com/AllenDang/gform

3. go install github.com/AllenDang/gform

Have fun now!

Recommand Tools

1. ResEdit - very good tool to edit resource file, strongly recommand! http://www.resedit.net/

2. windres - tools to compile *.rc file to *.o which makes it is possible to embed resource file into *.exe.

Contribute

Contributions in form of design, code, documentation, bug reporting or other ways you see fit are very welcome.

Thank You!