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Program GUIs in Go with Fyne

Fyne Work

Article from ADMIN 66/2021

By Markus Hoffmann

In Go, which was originally developed for system programming, graphical user interfaces were not typically necessary. But a relatively new toolkit, Fyne, lets programmers build platform-independent GUIs for Go programs.

Creating a graphical user interface (GUI) with the Fyne framework [1] requires some preparation, including installing the GCC compiler and a graphics driver [2]. You will also need at least Go v1.12. The command

go get fyne.io/fyne/v2

downloads and sets up Fyne v2.

To get a first impression of the different Fyne widgets, you can take a look at a demo app [3] and its available controls. To download and launch this Fyne demo, enter

go get fyne.io/fyne/v2/cmd/fyne_demo
fyne_demo

in the terminal.

Basic Framework

A few lines of code are all it takes to create a spartan window in Fyne (Listing 1). The import statement brings in the required packages. To create an executable program, line 9 defines the main() function as the entry point. The app.New() method creates a new Fyne instance, and the a.NewWindow("<Title>") method specifies a title for the header of the newly created program window.

Listing 1

Basic Fyne Framework

01 package main
02
03 import (
04   "fyne.io/fyne/v2"
05   "fyne.io/fyne/v2/app"
06   "fyne.io/fyne/v2/widget"
07 )
08
09 func main() {
10   a := app.New()
11   w := a.NewWindow("<Title>")
12   w.Resize(fyne.NewSize(200, 200))
13   w.SetContent(widget.NewLabel("Hello World!"))
14   w.CenterOnScreen()
15   w.ShowAndRun()
16 }

As you might expect from the last four lines, the program makes the window appear

...

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