doinsight / walk

A Windows GUI toolkit for the Go Programming Language

About Walk

Walk is a "Windows Application Library Kit" for the Go Programming Language.

Its primarily useful for Desktop GUI development, but there is some more stuff.

Setup

Make sure you have a working Go installation. See Getting Started

Note

Go 1.7.x doesn't work with walk anymore, Make sure you use Go 1.8.x or later.

To Install

Now run go get github.com/lxn/walk

Using Walk

The preferred way to create GUIs with Walk is to use its declarative sub package, as illustrated in this small example:

test.go

package main

import (
	"github.com/lxn/walk"
	. "github.com/lxn/walk/declarative"
	"strings"
)

func main() {
	var inTE, outTE *walk.TextEdit

	MainWindow{
		Title:   "SCREAMO",
		MinSize: Size{600, 400},
		Layout:  VBox{},
		Children: []Widget{
			HSplitter{
				Children: []Widget{
					TextEdit{AssignTo: &inTE},
					TextEdit{AssignTo: &outTE, ReadOnly: true},
				},
			},
			PushButton{
				Text: "SCREAM",
				OnClicked: func() {
					outTE.SetText(strings.ToUpper(inTE.Text()))
				},
			},
		},
	}.Run()
}

Build app

In the directory containing test.go run

go build

To get rid of the cmd window, instead run

go build -ldflags="-H windowsgui"

Run app

test.exe

Sample Output (Windows 7)

More Examples

There are some examples that should get you started.

Program Crashes

By default Go uses os threads with small stack sizes of 128KB. If your walk app crashes, it may be due to a stack overflow. Until a better solution is found, you can work around this by adding

import _ "runtime/cgo"

somewhere in your program. If you don't have gcc installed and on your PATH, you can alternatively add -linkmode internal to the -ldflags of your go build command like so:

go build -ldflags="-H windowsgui -linkmode internal"