The strengths of LGI is that it's a small enough library that one person can understand it all. Also it's not too much of a burden on an application, both in increased download time and memory footprint. Ultimately however size is a secondary consideration to the core feature of LGI and that is portability. Currently 3 serious ports exist: Windows, Mac and Linux. There is also Haiku/BeOS and SDL ports which are partially implemented.

You can build some basic documentation using doxygen and there is some scripting language docs. Mostly though a good place to start is looking at the apps with source code:

• Scribe
• i.Hex
• FileTeePee

• File system abstraction (LFile, LDirectory, LFileSystem, LVolume)
• Basic windows built around the LWindow and LView classes.
  • LEdit - Edit control (Win32: Native, Mac/Linux: LTextView3)
  • LCheckBox - Boolean control (On/Off)
  • LTextLabel - Label
  • LRadioGroup/LRadioButton - Select one of many options
  • LCombo - Combo box
  • LList - List control
  • LTree - Tree control
  • LBitmap - Image display
  • LProgress - Progress meter
  • LSlider - Slider control
  • LBox - Split into "n" panes
  • LTableLayout - Html table like layout control
  • LTabView - Tabbed control
  • LTextView3 - Unicode text editor
  • LToolBar - Toolbar control
  • LStatusBar - Status bar
  • LMenu / LSubMenu / LMenuItem - Menu controls
  • LPopup - Popup windows
  • LControlTree - A tree of settings with suitable edit controls
  • LToolTip - Tool tips
• Internally all text is Utf-8.
• Unicode font support (LFont, LFontType, LDisplayString). Tools for converting to/from native OS text and other codepages are provided. iso-8859-x and windows-12xx codepage support is native, other codepages supported via the iconv library.
• Multi-threading (LThread, LMutex, LThreadEvent, LEventTargetThread)
• Graphics library (LSurface, LMemDC, LScreenDC, LPrintDC)
  • Supports internally, all the basic primitives: Line, Circle, Rect, Blt, Flood, Polygon, Ellipse etc. No OS support required.
  • Bit depth conversion for bitmaps and colours.
  • Palette management.
  • Alpha blending.
  • Vector art library, anti-aliased rasterisation of primitives & text. Includes TTF -> path capability.
  • Graphic file format support (GIF, TIFF, JPEG(dll), PNG(dll), BMP, ICO).
• Full OS independant file open/save dialog (LFileSelect) There is also support for the Win32 and Mac native file open/save dialogs (API compatible).
• Mime type detection lookup API with support for finding a suitable app for a Mimetype.
• Platform independant XML resource file format for strings, dialogs and menus. All fully multi-lingual. LgiRes is a graphical editor for this format.
• Clipboard IO for text and bitmaps.
• Drag'n'drop events/API.
• Commonly used dialogs (LInput, LMsgBox, LAlert, LFindReplace).
• Date time handling (LDateTime). Date subtraction/addition, conversion to/from native format, conversion to/from strings.
• Container classes (LArray, List, LStream, LStringPipe).
• Network abstraction including OpenSSL support (LSocket, OpenSSLSocket).
• Network protocol client classes:
  • FTP (IFtp)
  • HTTP (IHttp)
  • SMTP (MailSmtp)
  • POP (MailPop3)
  • IMAP (MailIMap)
  • DNS (IDns)
• Xml (LXmlTree) and JSON (LJson) input/output .
• Simple HTML viewer and edit controls. Support for charsets, CSS classes/styles, tables (colspan etc). Does most things but can get stuck on advanced layouts (ie floats are not supported). Some form support. Hooks for scripting, but no Javascript engine.

Building LGI

hg clone https://phab.mallen.id.au/source/lgi/ lgi/trunk

sudo apt-get install mercurial libmagic-dev libgtk3.0-dev \
    libgstreamer1.0-dev libappindicator3-dev libssh-dev
hg clone https://phab.mallen.id.au/source/lgi/ lgi/trunk
cd lgi/trunk
ln -s Makefile.linux makefile
make -j 4