[signaru]

In the context here, it is about rapidly making a GUI by visually editing widgets, usually via drag and drop, pretty much like placing shapes in a power point slide. The IDE doesn't just contain a source code editor, but also that visual window/form "designer" (in Visual Studio jargon). The RAD IDE generates the GUI code from what you've drawn, instead of you having to manually type it yourself, hence the "Rapid" part. To attach code to an event (i.e. click) you often simply have to double click on the corresponding widget/control in the visual designer, or use the corresponding "Event" GUI element somewhere in the IDE. This was in contrast to how it was done with C++ options such as MFC prior to Visual Basic / Delphi.

It gets GUI layouts done fast, but I also think it has some drawbacks. Manually drawing controls, i.e. sizing & positioning, eventually becomes a tedious chore once you have a lot of them or if you anticipate frequent updates in the UI. One trick I always end up using is just using some simple math to do the layout as the form resizes. In C# + Winforms, I'd go further by bypassing the visual designer as much as I can and just manually spawn the widgets just like any other object. Other UI frameworks also assist in layouts or just don't make this a problem to begin with. For example WxWidgets, Qt and, if I'm right Ultimate++, have sizer/container controls that do the layout logic.

[badsectoracula]

Note that in Lazarus / Delphi things aren't exactly like that: while the IDE does generate some code, it is largely declarations for the object instances and event handles. There is no code generated for building the GUI itself, instead the framework uses language features like the RTTI and metaclasses to implement object serialization and the IDE is modifying live instances. Check my sibling comment to yours for more details.

Also note that Lazarus has way more layout functionality than what you'd see in, e.g. WinForms (in fact IIRC WinForms is even more limited than the version of Delphi that existed around its introduction). In addition to a simple "Align" property (which existed in Delphi and also has something similar in WinForms) that allows placing components at the edges and/or center area of a container (which already allows you to do a lot of layouts, e.g. many "vbox"-like layouts in other toolkits can be done in Lazarus/Delphi by setting the Align property to "alTop" or "alBottom" in all of the container's children - similar with "hbox"-like layouts by using "alLeft" or "alRight") it also has an "anchor" functionality that allows either anchoring the edges of control in place (so that, e.g., if you resize a form and you have a button anchored to the left and right sides, it will be resized horizontally) or specifying how controls relate to each other via their edges. This allows you to do things like having one button have its right edge anchored 10 pixels from to the form's right edge, its left edge not being anchored anywhere, a listbox's right edge anchored 5 pixels from the button's left edge and a bunch of other buttons having their left and right edges anchored to the left and right edges of the first button while their top edges are anchored to one of the other buttons so they form a stack. Almost all controls have an "AutoSize" property which allows them to resize themselves automatically (often to fit their contents - or, for containers, their children), which essentially means that you get automatic layout that works when forms are resized and regardless of font sizes, etc. When anchors are not enough, all containers have a ChildSizing property which allows you to specify some simple automatic layouts for children, like using row-major or column-major ordering, having them use the exact same width and/or height, etc. Finally if none of these are enough, there are some other layout-related controls like a splitter (which automatically adjusts the width of controls laid out via the Align property), pairsplitter (which provides a container with a splitter in case Align isn't enough), flow panel (which lays out children in various ways like, left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, etc with wrapping based on rules you set for each child), scroll box (which is basically a container with automatic scrollbars when the contents do not fit), etc.

Also note that all the above are done visually without any code, though of course you can also write code if you want. It is just that it is way more rare to need to do that, especially when compared to WinForms or (worse) classic VB.

Personally whenever i make a GUI in Lazarus i place the controls manually approximating how i want the layout to be and then open the anchor editor and start assigning relations. This is enough for 99% of the layouts.