Lightweight C / C ++ GUI library with a natural look and feel

Question

There are many pages in the C / C ++ GUI libraries, but it is very difficult for me to find those that have a native look and feel.

I looked at GTk +, and the problem is that these Windows emulators look very good, they do not look like windows windows, because it is not. Buttons, for example, do not disappear on hover, as in Windows 7; they suddenly become highlighted because they are actually just custom-made elements that look like buttons.

Does anyone know of any lightweight cross-platform graphics library that actually uses its own controls (and therefore easily integrates with the OS), rather than just trying to simulate them? (I need it to be lightweight, so I can just link statically with it without turning a 50K program into a 2 MB program.)

Answer 1

Have you tried wxWidgets ?

On the home page:

Unlike other cross-platform toolkits, wxWidgets gives its applications a truly original look because it uses the platform’s own API and not GUI emulation

Answer 2

I suggest Qt4. I don’t know if I can call it easy, but in my opinion this is the best cross-platform multipurpose framework. And it's free (LGPL). It comes with a very functional IDE-QtCreator.

Answer 3

If you think about what you ask, you ask a lot. To do this, the windows / GUI APIs must be abstracted to a common point on all supported platforms. This is a very big and difficult task.

Answer 4

I would watch FLTK. It should be quick and easy. I worked with both wxWidgets and FLTK, and FLTK is much easier. It also has a GUI designer tool that will generate code if you want. Many sample programs.