I recently looked into this for a while (best I can do is this Twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/YorickPeterse/status/1412417105329365004 https://twi

I recently looked into this for a while (best I can do is this Twitter thread about it: https://twitter.com/YorickPeterse/status/1412417105329365004 https://twitter.com/YorickPeterse/status/1412417105329365004), as I wanted to see how feasible it would be to write a GUI text editor in Rust. My conclusion is basically "there's nothing viable". _If_ you are OK with basically limiting yourself to Linux/BSD, the GTK bindings are good. However, for a text editor you'll likely need a custom text widget (the GTK ones aren't very good), and that's where things (with basically any GUI toolkit) get tricky. There are a few libraries providing Qt bindings for Rust, but they either focus on QML, are only infrequently maintained (e.g. Ritual), or seem to focus more on exposing Rust to C++; not the other way around. egui looked really interesting, and the immediate mode GUI pattern is really nice to write. Sadly, it's still in the very early stages, and most notably is lacking support for displaying text with different colors/styles. The rest isn't really worth mentioning I think, at least when wanting to write a text editor. They basically all suffer from the same issues, such as: - It not being clear if the library will still exist 2 years from now - Poor support for Unicode (especially Emoji) - No support for assistive technologies - Poor support for flexible text rendering (e.g. multiple colors and styles) - Little to no documentation For a while I thought about just using Electron, or maybe Sciter (that would at least need fewer resources). Technology wise I think HTML makes sense, as it's very flexible (e.g. many GUI toolkits struggle the moment you want to mix text and e.g. images in the same widget) and quite easy to work with. Sadly, Electron is a fat pig and the last thing I want to do is write Javascript in my spare time. Sciter is proprietary, and you can't distribute the binaries yourself (from what I understand). That basically means your project is dead on arrival, at least if you intend to open source it. So for now I shelved my idea. Maybe in a year I'll take another look :)