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I am in need of a GUI toolkit that goes a little further than tk does, but my school's computers do not allow programs to run if they try to create/alter files on the local disk. Because of that, I need a portable GUI toolkit for Windows. Does anybody know of one?

fr00ty_l00ps
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  • I know that the [Qt4 library](http://qt.digia.com/try-qt-now/) includes Ruby language bindings; it might work in-memory only... ? – maerics Sep 24 '12 at 14:43
  • Heh. Teenager who spends most of his time programming = broke teenager, who cant afford anything but free when it comes to software XD – fr00ty_l00ps Sep 24 '12 at 14:45
  • that's how I cut my teeth, it did me good! =) – maerics Sep 24 '12 at 14:50
  • through some psuedo-random clicking, I got to this site: http://qt-project.org However, I do not want to download 1.7gb onto my flashdrive without asserting that it will work and is portable. Any ideas on that? – fr00ty_l00ps Sep 24 '12 at 14:56
  • What does "further" mean to you? More widgets? More modern look? Stylesheets? Printing support? HTML support? Since you are just learning, you might be surprised at just how far Tk can take you. Though, if you're looking for something specific please let us know so we can give relevant suggestions. – Bryan Oakley Oct 03 '12 at 21:29
  • I am creating a simple fractal program, but I want a few more features than what Tk is giving me, nothing in particular, but just more power, you know what I mean? – fr00ty_l00ps Oct 04 '12 at 14:15

4 Answers4

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Qt4 and ruby-qt (the qtbindings gem works beautifully to get the ruby bindings)

sylvain.joyeux
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  • see http://blog.shoesrb.com/post/1480014928/other-ruby-gui-toolkits-qtruby for a comparison between qtruby and shoes, i let you decide who wins – peter Sep 24 '12 at 20:41
  • and an absolutely not biased comparison ;-). Btw, one thing you get with qt: Qt Designer to draw your forms / windows graphically. – sylvain.joyeux Sep 24 '12 at 20:43
  • The URL given for the comparison is dead but the post can be found at archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/http://blog.shoesrb.com/post/1480014928/other-ruby-gui-toolkits-qtruby – peak Feb 09 '16 at 20:10
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Green Shoes, just install the gem, copy it along with your Ruby map to a stick and you are off to go.

gem install green_shoes

http://ashbb.github.com/green_shoes/App.html

a simple sample

require 'green_shoes'
Shoes.app{
  e = edit_line
  button("Click me!"){alert("You entered #{e.text}")}
}
peter
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  • Heh, well, Green Shoes itself seems to be portable.. But it requires gtk2.... Which isnt portable as far as I can tell.... As someone on irc put it: I am like a prisoner in a cage -_- oh well, I will eventually get it to work ^^ – fr00ty_l00ps Sep 25 '12 at 14:07
  • i use green shoes on windows vista pc's where nothing of Ruby nor gtk2 is installed, they execute the script by loading everything from network, it is slow but it works – peter Sep 25 '12 at 15:06
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For graphical applications in Ruby, I personally prefer JRuby + Swing. Presumably your school's computers have a JRE installed... perhaps you can run JRuby from your flash drive?

Alex D
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0

I see you haven't yet accepted an answer, so i try another suggestion. Again, you only need a Gem, Watir in this case. Your browser is the GUI. Here a question i asked and the answer i accepted

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11724201/use-browser-as-gui-in-ruby

That example uses IE but the other browsers are possible too, this solution is cross-browser and cross OS

peter
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