GUI design

From Lazarus wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

Deutsch (de) English (en) français (fr) 日本語 (ja)

Overview

When working on lazarus, certain design guidelines need to be taken into consideration. To prevent a diversity of styles and ensure the clarity of dialogs. The next article tries to summarize several guidelines to help you designing.

Dialogs

Dialogs are special forms that need the user to make / change some setting before lazarus can continue.


Dialog Settings

Settings that should be applied in general are;

  • BorderStyle : bsSizeToolWin
  • Position : poScreenCenter
  • FormStyle : fsStayOnTop (or show the dialog using ShowModal)

General layout

  • On the bottom all required buttons to close / cancel the dialog, or to recieve help should be placed
  • At least fit a screen of 800x640
  • Close on Escape (if key not used otherwise)
  • Define default button and Return activates it (if key not used)
  • Medium to complex dialogs should be resizable and size is stored

Button panel

The button panel should consist at least of the following elements;

  • OK button
  • Cancel button
  • Next button (optional)
  • Previous button (optional)
  • Help button

An example is shown below:

bottom panel.jpg

Anchoring

To make sure that a dialog after resizing will keep on showing the components in a good way, anchoring is being used. Each components has a property called Anchors. With this property you can determine the way a component is anchored to it's parent.

Aligning

Another way to organise components is using alignment. Each component has a property Align. By selecting the appropriate align position several components can be positioned properly.

BorderSpacing

Especially useful in combination with Align is the BorderSpacing property. (Also found on the Anchors dialog). A typical borderspacing of 6 pixels around a component is used.

Dialogs to be converted to LFM

Striked items are already converted.

Bold items are being worked on

  • /lazarus/ide/addtoprojectdlg.pas <D. Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/buildlazdialog.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/clipboardhistory.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/codetemplatedialog.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/codetoolsdefines.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/codetoolsoptions.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/compileroptionsdlg.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/diffdialog.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/diskdiffsdialog.pas <D. Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/editoroptions.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/environmentopts.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/exttooldialog.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/exttooleditdlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/findinfilesdlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/findreplacedialog.pp <D. Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/helpmanager.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/inputfiledialog.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/keymapping.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/macropromptdlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/mainbar.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/makeresstrdlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/msgview.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/newdialog.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/newprojectdlg.pp <D. Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/patheditordlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/projectinspector.pas <D.Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/projectopts.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/runparamsopts.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/searchresultview.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/sortselectiondlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/splash.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/sysvaruseroverridedlg.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/todolist.pp <D. Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/unitdependencies.pas
  • /lazarus/ide/uniteditor.pp
  • /lazarus/ide/unitinfodlg.pp <D.Blaszijk>
  • /lazarus/ide/viewunit_dlg.pp
  • /lazarus/debugger/debuggerdlg.pp
  • /lazarus/debugger/test
  • /lazarus/debugger/watchpropertydlg.pp
  • /lazarus/designer/aligncompsdlg.pp
  • /lazarus/designer/designermenu.pp
  • /lazarus/designer/menueditorform.pas
  • /lazarus/designer/menupropedit.pp
  • /lazarus/designer/noncontrolforms.pas
  • /lazarus/designer/objinspext.pas
  • /lazarus/designer/scalecompsdlg.pp
  • /lazarus/designer/sizecompsdlg.pp
  • /lazarus/ideintf/columndlg.pp
  • /lazarus/ideintf/componenteditors.pas
  • /lazarus/ideintf/graphpropedits.pas
  • /lazarus/ideintf/imagelisteditor.pp
  • /lazarus/ideintf/listviewpropedit.pp
  • /lazarus/ideintf/propedits.pp
  • /lazarus/packager/addtopackagedlg.pas
  • /lazarus/packager/brokendependenciesdlg.pas
  • /lazarus/packager/packagedefs.pas
  • /lazarus/packager/pkggraphexplorer.pas
  • /lazarus/packager/pkgoptionsdlg.pas
  • /lazarus/tools/apiwizz/apiwizard.pp

Look and Feel

This paragraph show several examples of look and feel concepts for Lazarus. Please comment...

todo.png The todo form shows a typical form with buttons. Instead of stretching the buttons across the entire clientwidth (code explorer, project inpector, etc.) a toolbar on top is shown with labeled buttons.


File:unitinformation.png This form shows a typical information dialog. Notice the notebook that splits the information, so that there is not too much information at the same time visible.


File:findreplace.png This form shows a typical dialog. Captions before controls are right aligned (not wel vissible in this example though) and the options are grouped under bold labels.