this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
9 points (90.9% liked)

Learn Programming

1961 readers
4 users here now

Posting Etiquette

  1. Ask the main part of your question in the title. This should be concise but informative.

  2. Provide everything up front. Don't make people fish for more details in the comments. Provide background information and examples.

  3. Be present for follow up questions. Don't ask for help and run away. Stick around to answer questions and provide more details.

  4. Ask about the problem you're trying to solve. Don't focus too much on debugging your exact solution, as you may be going down the wrong path. Include as much information as you can about what you ultimately are trying to achieve. See more on this here: https://xyproblem.info/

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking to write a simple program which can run both on Win XP SP3 (ideally without added dependencies, if it all possible) and modern Linux. Really, it should be platform agnostic but XP and Linux are what I'm specifically interested in.

The program will be for managing my cd-keys for my XP games. It'll have a simple gui with a search box and an output box. It'll parse text files in it's subdir when searching via search box and output the cd-key string contained within.

From what I can see, it would be good/viable to use C++ so it runs on XP and Linux and use gtkmm3 for the UI for the same reason.

Does this make sense or am I missing something glaringly obvious? Any input would be much appreciated~

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with GUI development on XP, but could you accomplish this with a script that you run in the terminal? That might be easier than dealing with a GUI that needs to work on both old and modern systems.

You could alias it to a command like getGameKey your_search_query on both to keep the usage the same. You may need a slightly different command for each one (using find+grep on Linux, some Windows command line equivalent on XP)

[โ€“] xvertigox@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Thanks heaps for the idea. I could definitely do it on Linux via a script and it looks like XP has findstr.

It shouldn't require parsing text files intelligently either. If each line is [Game Name] - [CD-Key], it can just spit the whole line out.