Tutorial

This walks through getting SVision3 building on your machine and writing a minimal window with a label and a button.

Prerequisites

• A C++20 compiler (GCC, Clang, or MSVC)
• CMake and Conan 2
• On Linux, harfbuzz and freetype installed via your system package manager (required on every distro, regardless of windowing backend).

1. Add svision3 as a connan requirent

If you use conan.py:

from conan import ConanFile
from conan.tools.cmake import cmake_layout

class MyApp(ConanFile):
    settings = "os", "compiler", "build_type", "arch"
    generators = "CMakeDeps", "CMakeToolchain"

    def requirements(self):
        self.requires("svision3/0.0.1")
        self.requires("spdlog/1.14.1")

    def build_requirements(self):
        self.test_requires("catch2/[>=3.0 <4.0]")

If you use conan.txt

[requires]
svision3/0.0.1
spdlog/1.14.1
catch2/[>=3.0 <4.0]

[generators]
CMakeDeps
CMakeToolchain

2. Write your first window

Create a main.cpp:

#include "toolkit/application.hpp"
#include "toolkit/button.hpp"
#include "toolkit/label.hpp"
#include "toolkit/layout.hpp"
#include "toolkit/window.hpp"

int main() {
    toolkit::Application app;
    auto window = app.create_window("Hello", {400, 200});

    // note the chainability, you get a reference to the widget
    auto root = std::make_unique<toolkit::VBoxLayout>()
        .set_margins({20, 20, 20, 20})
        .set_spacing(12);
    root->add_widget(std::make_unique<toolkit::Label>("Hello, world!"));
    root->add_widget(std::make_unique<toolkit::Button>("&Quit"))->on_click = [window] {
        // simple lambda as callback,
        window->close();
    };

    window->set_root(std::move(root));
    window->show();
    return app.run();
}

A few things worth noting:

• Application owns the event loop; app.run() blocks until the last window closes.
• Widgets are owned via std::unique_ptr and handed to their parent layout or window — no manual memory management or parenting calls needed.
• &Quit renders as Quit with the Q underlined as a mnemonic (Alt+Q activates the button on platforms that support it).
• Layouts (VBoxLayout here) stack widgets vertically; use HBoxLayout for horizontal arrangements, and nest them to build more complex UIs.

3. Pick a rendering backend (optional)

The default backend is native per platform (CoreGraphics on macOS, GDI+ on Windows, Cairo on Linux). Override it at runtime:

SVISION_PAINT=opengl ./build/Release/demo

Pre make template

While this will work, and get you started many things like linting, gitignore, indentation, building binaries on push etc - still need to be done.

Instead we got a ready made repository with all the setup already done. You should clone it, (ideally - recommit the first commit with your own name, git commit --amend --reset-author) and then push it to your own repository.

Visit - https://github.com/diegoiast/svision3-starter

git clone https://github.com/diegoiast/svision3-starter

Next steps

Browse the widget and module reference to see everything available — layouts, widgets, charts, theming, and more.