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Common FAQ

See also top-level FAQ page.

List of questions in this category

Who deletes all the windows I create?

All windows and controls in wxWidgets programs are created using new but you shouldn’t use delete to free them. This doesn’t result in memory leaks because wxWidgets takes care of this: all objects derived from wxWindow will be deleted automatically by the library when the corresponding real, on screen, window is destroyed. Thus, the top level window objects are deleted when you call Close() or Destroy() and all the child windows are deleted just before the parent window is. More details about the top level windows can be found in the “Window deletion overview” in the manual.

wxWidgets also automatically deletes some other kind of the objects, notably the sizer or constraint associated with the window – this happens just before the window itself is deleted. The sizers, in turn, delete their child sizers automatically as well so in a typical situation you don’t have to worry about freeing the sizers you create. Note, however, that if you Remove() a sizer from the window, it isn’t automatically deleted any more and you are responsable for doing this.

Why does my button (or another control) get so big?

Surprisingly, button created in the following way:

MyFrame::MyFrame() : wxFrame(NULL, wxID_ANY, "My Frame")
{
    auto button = new wxButton(this, wxID_ANY, "Hello, wxWidgets!",
                               wxPoint(10, 10), wxSize(80, 30));
}

will appear much bigger than its specified size of 80 by 30 pixels. In fact, it will fill in the entire frame client area, irrespectively of how big it is. This happens because top level windows such as wxFrame resize their unique child to always fill all the available space by default and this is done so that the usual approach of creating a wxPanel inside the frame and then creating various controls inside this panel. Which also provides the best solution for the problem, which consists in doing this instead:

MyFrame::MyFrame() : wxFrame(NULL, wxID_ANY, "My Frame")
{
    auto panel = new wxPanel(this);
    auto button = new wxButton(panel, // Notice the change of parent.
                               wxID_ANY, "Hello, wxWidgets!",
                               wxPoint(10, 10), wxSize(80, 30));
}

However please notice that using fixed sizes for the controls is strongly discouraged, as this won’t work correctly on all platforms and on all the different screens, using different resolutions. Please use sizers (see wxSizer and related classes documentation) for positioning them instead.

How to create and use custom events?

Please look at the event wxWidgets sample source code, it shows how to do this among other things.

Why doesn’t my code work when I create a window from a thread?

Using any GUI functions from the thread other than the main one (the one running the application event loop) is not supported, in particular creating windows from a worker thread will never work. If you need to do anything from the worker thread the simplest way to do it is to post a custom event to the main thread asking it to do whatever is necessary.

How can I set the TAB order of the controls?

You can call wxWindow methods MoveBeforeInTabOrder() and MoveAfterInTabOrder() to change the position of a child window in the TAB chain. Notice that by default the TAB order is the same as the order of creation.

What is the difference between _T(), wxT() and _()?

First of all, _T() is exactly the same as wxT() (it exists only because it should be more familiar to Windows programmers) which reduces the problem of choosing among the macros to use somewhat.

Here is some pseudo-code for choosing the macro to use between the remaining possibilities, that is whether to use wxT(), use _() or not use any of them:

if ( string should be translated )
    use _("string")
else if ( string should be in Unicode in Unicode build )
    use wxT("string")
else
    just use "string" normally

wxT() used to be mandatory for code intended to compile in both Unicode and ANSI builds. Currently it is no longer required. Note that _() always took care of it internally so code using it will continue to compile in both Unicode and ANSI builds.

Please see the description of these macros in the manual for more details.

Why doesn’t Esc close my dialog?

Pressing Esc will close the dialog if and only if it has a button with wxID_CANCEL id.

How can I get rid of message boxes with error messages?

These message boxes are probably shown due to calls to wxLogError() or other log functions from wxWidgets code. To completely suppress them you may use wxLogNull class, please see the manual for details. Do note, however, that a better solution is to avoid the error in the first place as suppressing these error messages might hide other, important, ones.

How do I write a Unix makefile for my program?

The simplest way to write a makefile is to copy samples/minimal/makefile.unx from the wxWidgets distribution and adapt it to your needs. Notice that you should not use the Makefile file from the same directory as it only works for the samples because it assumes that the program being built is inside wxWidgets source tree.

The makefile.unx files use wx-config instead and are more flexible. The minimal makefile has comments inside it explaining how to adapt it for your program.

XRC can’t display non-ASCII characters correctly

If you use the wxXRC_USE_LOCALE flag (which is on by default), strings from XRC files are translated using wxLocale. wxLocale assumes the strings are in ASCII - if they are not, wxXmlResource leaves them in UTF-8 encoding in ANSI builds of wxWidgets. Either don’t use wxXRC_USE_LOCALE or use translate="0" attribute in XRC files.