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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T09:50:51+00:00

I have a general question on how to develop an image viewer plugin with

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I have a general question on how to develop an image viewer plugin with Firebreath. For that, I would like to incorporate a GUI framework, like wxwidget or Qt. The GUI would be used to to fire up some dialogs, adding a toolbar on top, or to open context menus with right clicking an image.

As far as I understand I have a hwnd handle and so I can draw onto a window. I also understand that I have various events I can react on, like mouse button clicks or keyboard strokes. But it fails me how I would add graphical menus, buttons, etc. I know I could use html around the window but that’s not the route I like to take.

For instance, does it makes sense to render an user interface offline (in memory) onto an image and then keep somehow track of the state internally?

Has anyone done such thing? Or can anyone give me some insight on how to accomplish adding a user interface.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Assuming you only care about windows and assuming that you don’t mind using a windowed plugin, which is the easiest (but no HTML elements can float over the plugin), it should be no different than creating a GUI in any other windows application.

    You are given a window that shows up with the AttachedEvent; when DetachedEvent is fired you need to stop using the window. Many people create a child window inside that parent window and use that for all their actual real code which makes it a little easier to use one of those other abstractions, but that’s basically all there is to it. I don’t know specifically how you’d do it with QT or wxwidget but you’d create a child window of that HWND that you are given and have the abstraction do your thing for you.

    As to whether or not it would be rendering things offscreen, etc, I have no idea; that would totally depend on the window system. There is no reason that I know of that you would need to do that, and most things just draw directly to the HWND, but there are a zillion different ways you could do it. It looks to me like what you really need is to understand how drawing in Windows actually works.

    I hope that helps

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