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Article #1972: FLTK 1.4.2 released on Feb. 23, 2025

Created at 05:45 Feb 23, 2025 by AlbrechtS

Last modified at 10:29 Feb 23, 2025

We are pleased to announce the release of FLTK 1.4.2.

This is a maintenance release with bug fixes and improvements. Its ABI and API are 100% backwards compatible with FLTK 1.4.0. We recommend all users of FLTK 1.3.x and previous 1.4 releases to upgrade to FLTK 1.4.2.

For details (changelog) please see CHANGES.txt [5].

Since FLTK 1.4.1 FLTK releases are exclusively hosted on GitHub [3]. Links to all releases can be found on FLTK's download page [4] as usual.

Notes about FLTK 1.4.0 and higher

FLTK 1.4 is a new release series with major enhancements, new widgets, macOS and CMake improvements, and bug fixes. It is based on the final release of FLTK 1.3.4. Later updates have been backported to 1.3.5 - 1.3.11 and branch-1.3 (Git).

FLTK 1.4 is intended to be mostly API compatible with FLTK 1.3.x so you don't need to change source code when you upgrade to FLTK 1.4. However, all programs must be recompiled with FLTK 1.4 because the ABI (Application Binary Interface) has changed.

Potential source code conflicts are documented in chapter "Migrating Code from FLTK 1.3 to 1.4" of the user documentation [1].

FLTK 1.4 adds new widgets (e.g. Fl_Flex, Fl_Grid) for flexible GUI layout, Fl_Scheme_Choice for scheme selection by users, and more. Other widgets (Fl_Tabs, Fl_Tile, Fl_Spinner etc.) have been improved for better user experience.

FLTK 1.4 adds support for HighDPI displays under Linux/Unix and Windows and improves HighDPI support on macOS. The initial screen scaling factor is read from the system and application windows can be zoomed (in/out/reset) by the user with ctrl/+/-/0 shortcuts, respectively.

CMake support has been improved significantly and requires CMake 3.15 (released 02/2020) or higher. autotools/configure/make is still supported but will be dropped in the next minor release (1.5.0).

macOS is supported up to "Sequoia" (15.3).

The platform dependent code in FLTK 1.4 was rewritten to enable better porting to new platforms. Basically all platform dependent code has been isolated and implemented in virtual methods of "driver" classes.

FLTK is now compatible with the Wayland platform on current Linux distributions and FreeBSD. The default build of the library on these platforms supports both X11 and Wayland in a "hybrid" library. Programs compiled and linked to this library launch using Wayland if it is available at runtime and fall back to X11 if not. Programs using X11 specific code that are not yet ported to Wayland can be used on pure X11 systems or by disabling the Wayland support on startup so they fall back to using X11 only. This requires 'XWayland' support on Wayland enabled (Linux) systems.

Future Development

The current development branch on GitHub [2] is `master`. This will be changed to `branch-1.4` when development of FLTK 1.5 begins and 1.4 will be switched to maintenance mode.

Links

[1] https://www.fltk.org/doc-1.4/ (HTML)
    https://www.fltk.org/doc-1.4/fltk.pdf (PDF)
[2] https://github.com/fltk/fltk.git
[3] https://github.com/fltk/fltk/releases/
[4] https://www.fltk.org/software.php
[5] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fltk/fltk/refs/tags/release-1.4.2/CHANGES.txt

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