Portable fltk setup for Visual Studio and Xcode

[anmol....@gmail.com]

This is an excellent article by Ian about making portable makefiles using fltk-config 

https://www.fltk.org/articles.php?L599

However this makes a vanilla Makefile, and most of us use IDEs like Visual Studio and Xcode.

Is there a way to use fltk-config inside the Flags and linker fields within these IDE settings ?

I could not figure out how to use scripts to set header paths, linker flags, c++ flags.

[duncan]

This is an excellent article by Ian about making portable makefiles using fltk-config 

https://www.fltk.org/articles.php?L599

However this makes a vanilla Makefile, and most of us use IDEs like Visual Studio and Xcode.

Is there a way to use fltk-config inside the Flags and linker fields within these IDE settings ?

If you are using FLTK-1.3.x there are some manually maintained configurations for Visual

Studio, but these are obviously snapshots tested on the specific version of Visual Studio

available at that point in time. As FLTK-1.3.x is "end-of-life" it's unlikely that there will be

further updates for newer version of Visual Studio [or Xcode], so to some extent you are

up a creek and need to find your own paddle.

One of the big steps forward in FLTK-1.4.x is the move to CMake, which can then generate

the *.sln file needed for Visual Studio and should offer a more stable build capability.

See also:

https://github.com/fltk/fltk/blob/master/README.CMake.txt

https://github.com/fltk/fltk/blob/master/README.Windows.txt

https://github.com/fltk/fltk/blob/master/README.macOS.md

However, do remember that FLTK-1.4.x is still a development version and a work-in-progress.

[anmol....@gmail.com]

I used the macOS guide to build and setup 1.4 and It works well. However, the includes, linker and loader flags need to copy-pasted into every project. 

I think fltk-config is an excellent utility and there may be a way to just pipe its output using the flags fields.

If I find out how the output of shell scripts can be used within the IDE flags - I will post it here.

[anmol....@gmail.com]

FWIW,

git clone https://github.com/fltk/fltk.git fltk-1.4

cd fltk-1.4 

mkdir build

cd build 

mkdir Xcode

cd Xcode 

cmake -G "Xcode" \         

    -D OPTION_USE_SYSTEM_LIBJPEG=Off \

    -D OPTION_USE_SYSTEM_ZLIB=Off \

    -D OPTION_USE_SYSTEM_LIBPNG=Off \

    ../..

Now open the .xcodeproj with Xcode and 

Xcode will ask to Autocreate Schemes. Click Automatically Create Schemes.

In Xcode, set the 'active Scheme' to 'fltk' and press CMD+R to compile

Right click on scheme and Open in Finder.

Now, close the fltk project. <-- THIS IS IMPORTANT as the project must not be open

You can drag the fltk xcodeproj to your custom project, and add under 

Target->Build Phases->Dependencies and

Target->Build Phases->Link Library with binaries

Now the static lib and headers are automatically picked up in your project.