The UI is not a specific design. I am working on porting a GUI API like (WxWidget but not that) to support the Amiga and trying to deal with the complexities of mapping the functionality of the generic API to Amiga Widgets. I was hoping to be able to use the high level constructs of Reaction with out having to dive deeper into intuition. The API wants to control alignment/layout hence my completely disabling the layout control. My challenge is understanding labels in unlike most other platforms they are a widget too. I can move gadgets around fine but not labels.

Lables are BOOPIS objects just like Gadgets, but they are based in imageclass not gadgetclass. There is quite a lot in common between the two, but images don't accept input.

Sounds to me like you may need to devise you own layout gadget if the standard one doesn't map well to the alien GUI. That will require lowlevl BOOPSI class coding and is ot a trivial undertaking for someone new the concepts.

It doesn't that there is a fair amount of private stuff going on between window.class and the layout gadgets.

You might need to drop window.class and use a plain Intuition window.

Hi dbstastny. Just wanted to add some comments. As belated as I am. :-)

I tend to agree with LyleHaze here. If you need more control then Intuition is one way to go about it. As that will give you control over position and size. And also images which is useful. Which, if you wanted, could be used to customise your font rendering.

But how much control do you need? Do you also need to render custom border images and fonts? Or can you leave it up to the GUI engine?

If you wanted full control you could use Intuition. However, if all you really need is the ability to specify size and position, then you should consider GadTools. This uses the building blocks of Intuition to create the gadgets but simplifies the creation process and also generates a standard look. It doesn't layout for you but does allow you to specify position and size. You just need to calculate the width of any text inside so size fits. Which is easy enough.

Under the shadow of ReAction, with no gadget auto layout, GadTools has been relegated to being a menu generator. Since it allows fairly simple menu generation. In fact, one thing it does layout is menus, so it left a funny legacy there. :-)

And dumb as it was I figured it out. Not sure if its a bug with image derived objects like labels but when under NOLAYOUT layout(Say that fast) it does not respect initial coordinates.

LAYOUT_NoLayout means exatly that, you have to do all the work yuourself. Images don't behave like gadgets, the don't really have specific location, the same image can be drawn in different places in the GUI (and so shared between gadgets).

Is there any sort of RTF control or am I going to have to write a texteditor that has colors as I cant seem to make a Textcontrol work at all respecting escape codes regardless of what the Documentation says.

If you are refering o texteditor.gadget then no there is no full colour support. Even the escape code approach was pretty minimal, and less so in the AmigaOS 4 version.

Highlighting certain lines is the limit (see AutDoc Viewer as an example. of what I mean).

There is richeditor.gadget in use by codebench, but the API is not public. Not sure if there is any plans for it to be.

Do you need the colours for syntax highlighting?

If by datatype you mean the simpleHTML.datatype refered in the other thread, yes it supports hyperlinks, but only file based ones , there's no http(s) .

As to syntax highlighting, even if the colours worked as advertised in texteditor.gadget it would not be suitable for syntax uses. You'll probably have to build your own.