XRCed

XRCed

XRCed is an open-source WYSIWYG UI designer for wxWidgets applications. It allows developers to visually construct user interfaces by dragging and dropping widgets into a canvas and editing their properties. Useful for rapid UI prototyping.
XRCed image
wxwidgets ui-designer wysiwyg prototyping

XRCed: Open-Source WYSIWYG UI Designer for wxWidgets

XRCed is an open-source WYSIWYG UI designer for wxWidgets applications. It allows developers to visually construct user interfaces by dragging and dropping widgets into a canvas and editing their properties. Useful for rapid UI prototyping.

What is XRCed?

XRCed is an open-source WYSIWYG UI designer application for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for applications using the wxWidgets toolkit. It allows developers to visually construct UIs by dragging and dropping widgets like buttons, menus, and panels into a design canvas and editing their properties through inspectors.

A key capability of XRCed is the ability to save the designed interfaces into XRC (XML Resource) format, which is an XML-based UI description language supported by wxWidgets. At runtime, wxWidgets can dynamically construct an interface from an XRC file. This supports rapid prototyping and experimentation with different UI layouts without having to edit and rebuild code.

XRCed simplifies the process of constructing complex user interfaces that would otherwise require significant hand-coding. Developers can focus more on high-level interface design choices rather than implementation details. The visual WYSIWYG editor makes tweaking and experimenting with layouts and styles much easier compared to editing raw XRC XML by hand.

Some key features of XRCed include supporting common wxWidgets widgets like menus, toolbars, buttons, combo boxes, panels, and sizers. Developers can edit both the visual appearance properties as well as runtime event handler bindings for widgets. XRCed also provides tools for testing and previewing designed interfaces before deploying to end-user applications.

Overall, XRCed aims to improve programmer productivity specifically for projects utilizing wxWidgets for the GUI component. It lowers the barrier to creating professional, high-quality user interfaces compared to hand-coding UIs, while still maintaining the flexibility to edit and extend the auto-generated XRC XML description files.

XRCed Features

Features

  1. WYSIWYG UI designer
  2. Drag and drop interface
  3. Visual editing of widgets
  4. Rapid UI prototyping

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Open source

Easy to use

Good for quick mockups

Integrates well with wxWidgets

Cons

Limited widget library

Not as full-featured as commercial alternatives

Steep learning curve


The Best XRCed Alternatives

Top Development and Ui Design and other similar apps like XRCed


Zenity icon

Zenity

Zenity is an open source command line utility for Linux that provides an easy way to create graphical user interfaces for scripts or command line programs. It allows displaying different kinds of dialog boxes, messages, data entry forms, progress bars, and more from the terminal or shell scripts without requiring...
Zenity image
VisualWX icon

VisualWX

VisualWX is an open-source desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that specializes in visual weather data. It is designed to provide detailed and customizable weather information through a variety of visual mediums.The software includes interactive weather maps showing radar, satellite, forecasts, observations, and more for anywhere in the world....
VisualWX image
Whiptail icon

Whiptail

Whiptail is a lightweight user interface shell originally designed for shell scripts. It provides a suite of dialog tools to display simple text user interfaces even when a graphical environment is not available, like in a Linux text console or terminal.Some of the common user interface components whiptail can generate...
Whiptail image
Glade icon

Glade

Glade is a free, open source graphical user interface designer program used to build interfaces for applications that use GTK and GNOME. It provides a visual editor that allows users to arrange widgets like buttons, menus, and windows by dragging and dropping instead of writing code.Some key features of Glade...
Glade image
WxGlade icon

WxGlade

wxGlade is an open source GUI designer and rapid application development (RAD) tool for wxWidgets. It allows quickly creating an application skeleton by designing its interface graphically, as well as generating Python code.Some key features of wxGlade include:Helps build wxWidgets applications faster by creating an application framework and skeleton through...
WxGlade image
KDialog icon

KDialog

KDialog is a useful utility for creating and displaying graphical dialog boxes from shell scripts or the command line. It is designed to integrate well with KDE desktop environments and applications.Some of the dialogs that KDialog can create include:Message boxes (information, warning, error, etc.)Input boxes (text, password, etc.)File selection boxesProgress...
KDialog image
WxSmith icon

WxSmith

wxSmith is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) plugin designed specifically for building applications using the wxWidgets C++ library. It aims to simplify and accelerate development by providing a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor for constructing user interfaces visually.Key features of wxSmith include:Drag-and-drop interface builder for placing buttons, menus, sizers, and other...
WxSmith image
WxFormBuilder icon

WxFormBuilder

wxFormBuilder is an open-source, cross-platform GUI designer that generates code for applications using the wxWidgets toolkit. It allows developers to create user interfaces by dragging and dropping components like buttons, text boxes, and panels instead of writing code manually.Some key features of wxFormBuilder include:Generates C++ code that is compatible with...
WxDev-C++ icon

WxDev-C++

wxDev-C++ is a free, open source integrated development environment for the C++ programming language. It is built around the wxWidgets cross platform GUI library, allowing applications developed with wxDev-C++ to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other platforms.Some key features of wxDev-C++ include:Syntax highlighting editor with auto-completion and...
WxDev-C++ image
WxMIll icon

WxMIll

wxMill is an open-source, cross-platform CAD/CAM application built specifically for CNC machining workflows. It enables users to go from CAD design to finished G-code for milling and turning CNC machines.Some of the key features of wxMill include:Import and export common CAD file formats like STEP, IGES, DXFDesign CAD models with...