How do I create a button in kotlin without xml?

Question

How do I make a button without any XML? I tried XML but it did not work and it is "Old" I heard.

Answer 1

Yeah, using XML is old but it's the standard way of defining views in Android. Nowadays exist alternatives to that such as Jetpack Compose which takes a more React style when declaring the GUI where you write @Composable functions that produce a UI. Quite nice.

In any case you can create the views yourself programatically but it's much more tedious, less maintainable and imho ?

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With that said, from your activity you can create instances of any of the layouts that you would use in XML and then add more views into it:

class YourActivty: AppCompatActivity() {
  override fun onCreate(...) {
    val frameLayout = FrameLayout(this).apply {
      // Configure the layout's properties
    }
    val button = AppCompatButton(this).apply {
       // Configure all button's properties 
    }
    frameLayout.addView(button)
    // Indicate your activity to use the framelayout as its content
    setContentView(frameLayout)
  }
}