PB’s Guide to Starting with wxWidgets on Microsoft Windows with MinGW and Code::Blocks

This Microsoft Windows specific guide hopes to assist the readers with decisions regarding which wxWidgets version and configuration to use and show how to build wxWidgets using MinGW with various parameters affecting the resulting build. It also describes in detail setting-up a C++ wxWidgets project in popular IDE Code::Blocks.

This guide is not a reference manual, it is a tutorial for new users of wxWidgets, MinGW, and Code::Blocks; supposed to be followed step by step.

Current Guide Version

5.0, released May 2, 2025

Versions of Software Used in Guide

wxWidgets: 3.2 (3.2.8 at the time of writing)

MinGW: MSYS2 mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-toolchain (GCC 15.1 at the time of writing)

Code::Blocks: 25.03

Warning

This guide does not cover actual wxWidgets programming nor using Code::Blocks (besides the steps necessary to set up a wxWidgets project).

Note

I suggest viewing this guide in a proper PDF viewer (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader), since GitHub's PDF viewer seems not to support displaying navigable table of contents or clicking on internal cross-references.