This dialog editor is a simple yet effective program to help you design dialogs that you need. It is not meant to be a feature packed program with tons of direct support for rendering dialogs exactly as they will appear in the actual program. It is simply a program that allows you to position abstract rectangular dialog elements the way you want your real dialogs to look like.
You should make sure that you've read the relevant sections in the Windows Platform SDK on dialogs before using this program. That will greatly facilitate your programming capabilities.
For installation instructions, see the file INSTALL.md.
Even though Windows compilers like MinGW32, Borland C++, and Microsoft Visual C++ Express edition are freely available, many of these come at the expense of excluding a Windows dialog editor. This makes Windows software development very limited and difficult, unlike Macintosh Classic where ResEdit that was generally freely available. On Windows, pretty much the only obvious choice for getting a dialog editor of any sort was Microsoft Visual C++ Professional/Enterprise, which costed quite a bit of money before they, and the entire Windows (GUI) platform, became obsolete around the year 2020 or so.
Hence, I wrote this dialog editor to make the ability to author Windows native software available to everyone in the world... or at the very least, more convenient and accessible for myself.
To add a new control to a dialog template you are editing, enter its dialog template code in the Text Window, then use the command "Add Control" (Ctrl+E). To modify the code of a selected control, change its code in the Text Window, then use the command "Apply Text" (Ctrl+W). You don't need a mouse to graphically edit the dialog template. Use "Tab" and "Shift+Tab" to select a control, and the arrow keys to move a control. Hold down the Control key and use the arrow keys to move a control one dialog unit.
The program has support for parsing and rendering all controls that
are specified with a special statement within the dialog template.
These controls are AUTO3STATE, STATE3, AUTOCHECKBOX, CHECKBOX,
AUTORADIOBUTTON, RADIOBUTTON, EDITTEXT, LISTBOX, COMBOBOX,
ICON, LTEXT, CTEXT, RTEXT, PUSHBOX, DEFPUSHBUTTON,
PUSHBUTTON, GROUPBOX, and SCROLLBAR. Note that each of these
controls only has limited support for rendering in certain styles.
Other controls specified with CONTROL are only drawn as a gray box
with the class name inside the box. If you need to preview more types
of controls, you can modify the program's source code to add the
necessary parsers and rendering functions to the program. The source
code is fairly modular and small, so this should not be a difficult
task.
Note to WYSIWYG users: Dialog base units can often times refer to fractional pixel quantities, which means that unit rounding can cause dialog elements of equal dialog base unit spacing to have different on-screen pixel spacings. However, changing the dialog units of such controls will cause them to have less accurate spacing when rendered in higher resolutions, so you are recommended to stick to dialog units when equal spacing is required.
The dialog template parser code does not skip comments, so you may experience unusual behavior in template files that contain comments. The parser code also requires that all parameters to a control statement are on the same line.
Even though I have wanted to make this program be cross-platform, I soon realized that such a wish would be just about impossible. The reason why is because Windows dialog editing is highly dependent on the font used for the dialog being edited. Considering that the majority of Windows dialogs use the proprietary fonts that come with Windows, this technically constrains Windows dialog editing to only be possible on Microsoft Windows.
Notes on dialog font selection: On Windows 2000/XP, the system dialog font can vary between different versions. On earlier Windows operating systems, the system dialog font is MS Sans Serif, but on Windows 2000/XP, the system font may be Tahoma. To design dialogs that always select the system dialog font, programmers are encouraged to set the font family of the dialog to "MS Shell Dlg", set the DS_SHELLFONT dialog style, and use the DIALOGEX resource instead of DIALOG.
However, when this Dialog Editor loads a dialog template, it just uses
a call to CreateFont() to get the font handle, which will always
return MS Sans Serif when specified MS Shell Dlg, independent of the
operating system version. To make sure that you are designing your
dialogs properly, you should manually set the font family to Tahoma
when you are editing such dialogs for Windows XP.
The main source code is all in the Public Domain.
See the file "UNLICENSE" in the top level directory for details.