I personally picked up both wxHaskell and reactive-banana at the same time and it was fine. In practice the two are almost orthogonal—reactive-banana completely supplants parts of wx and doesn't touch the rest at all, for the most part. (I recall some wx-specific quirks that leak out into reactive-banana code, but nothing too bad.) For me, the examples included with reactive-banana-wx were probably the most useful learning aide. Once you figure out how the examples work, you can modify them and see the changes right away, which is enough of a stepping stone to figure the rest out from the API docs. As far as superimposing text on an image, that should only take wxHaskell-specific code. You'll probably have to mess around with the layout, but the two widgets (text and image) should still be the same and so act the same from the perspective of reactive-banana. On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Jeffrey Brown wrote:

Hi!

I want to write a mindmapping app, like Freeplane, which involves drawing rectangles containing text and arrows connecting them. For that purpose, today I installed reactive-banana, wxWidgets, wxHaskell and reactive-banana-wx. (It's the first complex install for which I didn't have to write the list for help!)

Am I correct that the question of whether graphics can be superimposed over text depends only on wxHaskell, and not reactive-banana? Would you recommend first writing code that uses only wxHaskell, to become familiar with the library, or jumping right in by using reactive-banana at the same time?

Regards, Jeff

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Jeffrey Brown writes:

Hi!

I want to write a mindmapping app, like Freeplane, which involves drawing rectangles containing text and arrows connecting them. For that purpose, today I installed reactive-banana, wxWidgets, wxHaskell and reactive-banana-wx. (It's the first complex install for which I didn't have to write the list for help!)

Am I correct that the question of whether graphics can be superimposed over text depends only on wxHaskell, and not reactive-banana? Would you recommend first writing code that uses only wxHaskell, to become familiar with the library, or jumping right in by using reactive-banana at the same time?

Hi Jeffrey, You might be interested in the work I'm doing on a 2D level editor for a game I'm building. The game is "hadoom", and it's a clone of Doom (inventive name, eh?). The level editor is top-down cartography software, and you can see fairly recent screenshots here: http://t.co/LgMRHw2y0Z http://t.co/O2DhKZWwcG There is also an old video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfc4QkfAHx4 Anyway, the reason I say this might be interesting, is this is built using reactive-banana, GTK, and the "diagrams" library. I've found this a really nice way of building an interactive GUI such as this - GTK gives me the basic framework of the application, and I use a GtkDrawingArea for the main canvas. I then model all interaction through reactive-banana, and finally output a Diagram at the end. I use the diagrams-cairo backend to render this directly into the GtkDrawingArea. The source code for this is at https://github.com/ocharles/hadoom/tree/master/hadoom-editor though I should warn you it's somewhat in a state of rapid development, so things may change wildly. However, the basic approach of using GTK, reactive-banana & diagrams will not change. Hope this helps! -- ocharles