old FLTK programs

[LM]

I was just going through my build scripts to see how many older FLTK programs worked well with newer versions of FLTK.  I've been trying to collect enough FLTK programs to see if I could build a decent desktop from them.  I have builds for older programs like apcstudio and postoffice.  I think apcstudio was working in most cases and postoffice, I never got around to fully debugging or modernizing but the user interface looks really good.  Both are patched to build with later versions of FLTK.  Is anyone else interested in reviving some of the older FLTK applications?  I'd love to compare notes on that sort of thing or share patches.  I have build scripts for flcalc, xdiskusage, D+, flrec, fltdj, fltkmm, wordsearch, qubix, npuzzle and some others.

[Jose Quinteiro]

Yes please! Sounds like a fun project.

Thanks,
Jose

[LM]

Wondering if there's a good way to share some of these older programs.  The build system I'm using doesn't work well with version controls systems like git.

[Albrecht Schlosser]

On 4/18/26 16:34 LM wrote:

Wondering if there's a good way to share some of these older programs.

Thanks for working on older FLTK applications and for offering to share your work. I suggest to upload them to GitHub and to use CMake to build them, if you have the option to change/update the build system. I propose this because FLTK uses Git (stored on GitHub, as you know), and CMake looks like the best option to integrate the build with FLTK (use CMake's CONFIG mode, i.e. "modern CMake", to build with FLTK).

The build system I'm using doesn't work well with version controls systems like git.

That's a pity. I believe, if you want to share these old programs and also share a build system, then it should be compatible with Git, and the best choice would IMHO be CMake. But YMMV.

FWIW: Recently I detected an old FLTK application from 2006/2007 ("mchess", meanwhile renamed to "EmChess") that used configure/make and FLTK 1.1.7. I could easily make it build with FLTK 1.4 and/or 1.5 (likely also 1.3, I'm not sure) by using CMake with a "trivial" CMakeLists.txt file. Since this was only a test for myself I removed all the configure stuff and also an integrated SMTP library to make it build easily. I didn't publish (share) it set, because it's still experimental and not yet ready for use, but if I did, I'd upload it on GitHub ...

[LM]

On Saturday, April 18, 2026 at 1:22:29 PM UTC-4 Albrecht-S wrote:

The build system I'm using doesn't work well with version controls systems like git.

That's a pity. I believe, if you want to share these old programs and also share a build system, then it should be compatible with Git, and the best choice would IMHO be CMake. But YMMV.

I think a lot of build systems that work with the original package and apply patches against it aren't great candidates for storing via Git.  For instance, you don't see a lot of git repositories with just slackbuild scripts.  Since the original source might be hard to find on the internet, sharing the source tarball for use with the build script is a priority too.  Git's designed more for sharing source files not original tarballs with build scripts and patches.  

Personally, I use GNU make and if I need more control, I add CDetect.  It's a lot more lightweight than CMake and GNU autotools.  I don't use cmake on any of my systems and if any programs use it, I end having to rewrite build scripts just to compile those programs.  I've just never been a fan of cmake.  I can't easily bootstrap it from source.  It requires a lot of library dependencies and some of them don't work on some of the more unusual operating systems I've worked with.  I prefer to stay with more lightweight solutions.

 

FWIW: Recently I detected an old FLTK application from 2006/2007 ("mchess", meanwhile renamed to "EmChess") that used configure/make and FLTK 1.1.7. I could easily make it build with FLTK 1.4 and/or 1.5 (likely also 1.3, I'm not sure) by using CMake with a "trivial" CMakeLists.txt file. Since this was only a test for myself I removed all the configure stuff and also an integrated SMTP library to make it build easily. I didn't publish (share) it set, because it's still experimental and not yet ready for use, but if I did, I'd upload it on GitHub ...

Sounds like a nice find.

There are several great but older FLTK programs.  It would be nice to give them new life and it would increase the number of FLTK applications out there that other people could use.  Only a few distributions use FLTK as an integral part of their desktop.  Would be nice to see it used more.