Over the last few releases ProJucer has been increasingly buggy for visual editing. I came to the forum to check on others experience and after some digging I learn that the GUI editor is being or has been deprecated?
I must have missed the memo. Having a wysiwg GUI editor is a must for my workflow.
Can someone enlighten me (and perhaps others) as to what the status is of projucer (currently shipped as buggy part of JUCE) and what alternatives there are for GUI editing?
Does this also mean automated project creation handling multiple configurations is going away?
As far as I know that part of the Projucer hasn’t been updated in donkey’s years. It still works fine in terms of project creation, although many people prefer to use CMake these days. In terms of a GUI editor, you may want to look at Plugin Gui Magic.
The Projucer is used as a command line tool in lots of CI/CD pipelines to generate compiler/IDE projects, that part of the Projucer will certainly not be ditched in the coming few years.
I’m sorry that not having a WYSIWYG GUI editor is impacting your workflow, and that we evidently haven’t communicated this clear enough.
Our experience is that very few users rely on this feature as these kind of editors don’t often lend themselves well to making responsive GUIs and users find they quite quickly hit limitations with what they are capable of doing, to cater for all possible scenarios would be huge task for the team to take on. Therefore we strongly recommend using the FlexBox and/or Grid classes, see our tutorial here.
However if you’re anything like me, those CSS style classes, although flexible, can take some getting used to and tend to require me to read up on them each time I come back to them. So for very simple layouts I really enjoy subdividing rectangles by using the removeFromX functions in the Rectangle class. You can read more about that technique in this tutorial. There is good example of it in this old ADC video from Jules. If you take a look through all the tutorials we have 17 Graphics and interface design tutorials in total. You can also find lots of examples of all the above throughout the DemoRunner project if you want to take a look (The DemoRunner project can be found in the examples directory of the JUCE repository).
Obviously I recognise any change in workflow like this can be difficult and time consuming to initially take on but I think most users would agree that it tends to result in GUI’s that are both more responsive and easier to maintain/change in the future. There’s also a fantastic community of very helpful users on here who can very likely help you get unstuck if you do have any specific questions or issues that you encounter on the way.
There are currently no plans to deprecate the Projucer as a whole, it is only the GUI editor that is deprecated. For an alternative to the GUI editor I believe @daniel’s Plugin Gui Magic as mentioned above, could be a viable alternative (I’ve not used it, but I’ve read good things on the forums regarding it).
If you were looking for an alternative to the Projucer to handle multi-platform/configuration C++ projects then CMake would be the most obvious choice, that would probably be our first recommendation over the Projucer, but for what it’s worth I still use the Projucer on a daily basis.
I guess I missed the memo too. I sometimes use the GUI editor to assemble prototype UIs. Having recently upgraded to Juce 7 I found this post wondering why the GUI editor in Projucer 7 is so buggy. I’ll miss it but it’s not a huge loss. However, all my build scripts use Projucer to assemble VS and Xcode projects, I have not migrated to CMake, so obviously I’m in favor of retaining this functionality.
