Configure your IDE for wxWidgets

wxWidgets is natively supported by a number of IDEs. However, some of them must be set up manually to be able to find the symbols declared in wxWidgets headers. There are two reasons for this requirement:

  • wxWidgets headers do not reside in the system's include paths but in a subdirectory thereof (display the includes via cpp -v).
  • wxWidgets relies on pre-processor defines to determine details for compilation.

Both are generated by the wx-config shell script. Hence, one can use this script to display the required values.

wx-config --cxxflags

On my system, the above yields

-I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wx/include/gtk3-unicode-3.0 \
-I/usr/include/wx-3.0 \
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 \
-DWXUSINGDLL \
-D__WXGTK__ \
-pthread

The first two lines add the paths (after -I) to the list of directories to be searched for header files. The lines starting with -D are preprocessor definitions and get processed as if they appeared during translation in a #define directive.

KDevelop

To configure an existing KDevelop project

  1. select Project->Open Configuration... from the menu
  2. click on Language Support and add the include paths KDevelop wx include paths
  3. switch to Defines and add all required entries KDevelop wx defines

Make sure not to copy the values from my system but use the output created by
wx-config --cxxflags on your own system.