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It feels like we live in a pretty good time for writing TUIs, CLIs and also small self-contained tools (thanks to languages like Go, which have a lot of librari

It feels like we live in a pretty good time for writing TUIs, CLIs and also small self-contained tools (thanks to languages like Go, which have a lot of libraries, are easy to use, but also compile to statically linked executables). What stuck with me was using the Typer library for a Python tool that i wrote: https://typer.tiangolo.com/ https://typer.tiangolo.com/ It made regular shell scripts into a fully fledged CLI with nested commands thanks to just a few decorators that were sprinkled in the source files, as well as the occasional slight signature alteration. Developing a GUI feels awfully complicated in comparison and i'm amazed that there don't seem to be all that many (if any) frameworks for creating GUIs in a similar way - by annotating method calls as actions that correspond to the actual GUI elements and letting some smart parsing logic handle the rest for you. I feel like perhaps the world would be a slightly better place if desktop software could also be distributed as libraries of callable code, where you could automate button presses programmatically and there would be a 1:1 link between what you can do in code and manually.

dwohnitmok 5y ago
There is something kind of similar-ish in the GUI space that takes any commandline program and turns it into a simple GUI. https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey
rbanffy 5y ago
> Developing a GUI feels awfully complicated It’s kind of a language thing. When Visual Basic came out, it’s UI builder was ahead of anything I’ve ever seen on a GUI and more versatile than HyperCard (and much faster). A decent GUI builder attached to an IDE and some nice language support goes a long way. That’s the opposite of the experience you get when using, say, Flutter or React Native. The language is better than BASIC, though.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Sadly it seems a thing of the times, perhaps due to the direction the industry has gone in. I recall creating GUIs in Lazarus/FreePascal was really easy and an enjoyable experience, however there are so few libraries and integrations for it, that it's a non starter for new projects. There is Swing for Java which had a really nice GUI builder in NetBeans, but the other IDEs are somewhat lacking in comparison and then JavaFX/OpenJFX came out, which didn't integrate quite as nicely and complicated things further. As for .NET, it has always had lovely GUI options, especially with WinForms/WPF in Visual Studio, yet it has always lacked cross platform options for the most part. How we got from being able to drag and drop components to create fully functional GUIs to embedding browsers and creating apps with full webdev stacks locally never ceases to surprise me in a bad way.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    > I recall creating GUIs in Lazarus/FreePascal was really easy and an enjoyable experience, however there are so few libraries and integrations for it, that it's a non starter for new projects. Lazarus and Free Pascal are used for new projects all the time, if anything judging from the mailing lists, they are more popular than they've ever been (hell, unlike only just 5-6 years ago, i rarely see people mention that they remember using Turbo Pascal back in their school years whenever a new release is made nowadays :-P). Free Pascal comes with a ton of bindings out of the box, but making new ones for C should be simple with the included h2pas tool (i think there is also a frontend for Lazarus though i never used it myself). There should also be already made bindings for stuff that aren't distributed with Free Pascal. You should also be able to use Rust libraries by going via cbindgen -> h2pas, as well as any other language that can "export" C header files for FFI. Beyond that you can do it manually, which can be a pain, but that is the case with pretty much any language. Of course using libraries from scripting languages and managed languages like Python, JavaScript, Java and C# is harder but not impossible (and not really that much harder than using them from any other native language, C included).
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      It wouldn't be too difficult to build on Glade or QtDesigner and better integrate it with code generation. Both Glade and QtDesigner output language-neutral UI descriptions that could be used to build any sort of app.
      - badsectoracula 5y ago
        Lazarus already saves the forms into text-based files that you can read, however this is really missing the point and reducing an advanced RAD tool to nothing more than 80s-circa resource editor for Windows. There are tons of tools like that. The big feature of Lazarus (and Delphi and C++ Builder, etc) is how integrated the entire thing is - not just the form designer but also the framework being itself designed around its use inside Lazarus' form designer, object inspector, etc and the language having features (e.g. published properties) explicitly for such use and the IDE knows about the framework so it can automatically plug things, generate code (not in the Glade style of unidirectional generation but in that the IDE understands the code and can modify it). Hell, even C++ Builder actually feels a bit "alien" to VCL (which was originally made for Delphi and Borland had to add several extensions to C++ for it to work, which only really worked because they had their own compiler, linker, etc to work with). The closest you could get to that elsewhere is QtCreator but you quickly realize (assuming you were used to Lazarus-like tools, most developers actually do not realize that) you are working with something that was meant to be coded against instead of used with visual designers (which is kinda backwards IMO considering the "G" in GUIs and kinda remind me a quip about Motif back in the day about how its documentation was a bunch of volumes almost without any screenshot :-P). But if you want to do it right, you can't really work around the need for all these to be integrated with a unifying vision. Even Lazarus and Free Pascal, which are technically different projects, largely managed it because they basically did what Delphi already had done - and most of the warts when using Lazarus come from not being a truly integrated project like Delphi was, like issues with different FPC versions or relying on GDB as a debugger (which is the #1 source of debugging issues, fortunately there is a new debugger in works which can work as part of the IDE itself and personally find it to work fine, though it isn't enabled by default).
adiM 5y ago
I recently came across YAD (https://sourceforge.net/projects/yad-dialog/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/yad-dialog/), which is a improved version of dialog. Allows you to create a simple GUI, where all the entries are written to STDOUT. So, you can interface with your favorite language. For examples, see this page: http://smokey01.com/yad/ http://smokey01.com/yad/
- danudey 5y ago
  Note that the project hasn't been contributed to since 2017, and contains unfixed bugs from six years ago. Might be worth a fork or a rewrite.
  - ducktective 5y ago
    It's active. Seems to have been moved to https://github.com/v1cont/yad https://github.com/v1cont/yad
    - adiM 5y ago
      I installed via AUR (which uses the right github link) and didn't notice that I was bookmarking the old version of the project. Thanks!
hkopp 5y ago
Gooey is a similar tool to Typer that I have bookmarked for such cases, but never had the opportunity to use it. https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

dwohnitmok 5y ago

There is something kind of similar-ish in the GUI space that takes any commandline program and turns it into a simple GUI. https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

rbanffy 5y ago

> Developing a GUI feels awfully complicated It’s kind of a language thing. When Visual Basic came out, it’s UI builder was ahead of anything I’ve ever seen on a GUI and more versatile than HyperCard (and much faster). A decent GUI builder attached to an IDE and some nice language support goes a long way. That’s the opposite of the experience you get when using, say, Flutter or React Native. The language is better than BASIC, though.

KronisLV 5y ago
Sadly it seems a thing of the times, perhaps due to the direction the industry has gone in. I recall creating GUIs in Lazarus/FreePascal was really easy and an enjoyable experience, however there are so few libraries and integrations for it, that it's a non starter for new projects. There is Swing for Java which had a really nice GUI builder in NetBeans, but the other IDEs are somewhat lacking in comparison and then JavaFX/OpenJFX came out, which didn't integrate quite as nicely and complicated things further. As for .NET, it has always had lovely GUI options, especially with WinForms/WPF in Visual Studio, yet it has always lacked cross platform options for the most part. How we got from being able to drag and drop components to create fully functional GUIs to embedding browsers and creating apps with full webdev stacks locally never ceases to surprise me in a bad way.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  > I recall creating GUIs in Lazarus/FreePascal was really easy and an enjoyable experience, however there are so few libraries and integrations for it, that it's a non starter for new projects. Lazarus and Free Pascal are used for new projects all the time, if anything judging from the mailing lists, they are more popular than they've ever been (hell, unlike only just 5-6 years ago, i rarely see people mention that they remember using Turbo Pascal back in their school years whenever a new release is made nowadays :-P). Free Pascal comes with a ton of bindings out of the box, but making new ones for C should be simple with the included h2pas tool (i think there is also a frontend for Lazarus though i never used it myself). There should also be already made bindings for stuff that aren't distributed with Free Pascal. You should also be able to use Rust libraries by going via cbindgen -> h2pas, as well as any other language that can "export" C header files for FFI. Beyond that you can do it manually, which can be a pain, but that is the case with pretty much any language. Of course using libraries from scripting languages and managed languages like Python, JavaScript, Java and C# is harder but not impossible (and not really that much harder than using them from any other native language, C included).
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    It wouldn't be too difficult to build on Glade or QtDesigner and better integrate it with code generation. Both Glade and QtDesigner output language-neutral UI descriptions that could be used to build any sort of app.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      Lazarus already saves the forms into text-based files that you can read, however this is really missing the point and reducing an advanced RAD tool to nothing more than 80s-circa resource editor for Windows. There are tons of tools like that. The big feature of Lazarus (and Delphi and C++ Builder, etc) is how integrated the entire thing is - not just the form designer but also the framework being itself designed around its use inside Lazarus' form designer, object inspector, etc and the language having features (e.g. published properties) explicitly for such use and the IDE knows about the framework so it can automatically plug things, generate code (not in the Glade style of unidirectional generation but in that the IDE understands the code and can modify it). Hell, even C++ Builder actually feels a bit "alien" to VCL (which was originally made for Delphi and Borland had to add several extensions to C++ for it to work, which only really worked because they had their own compiler, linker, etc to work with). The closest you could get to that elsewhere is QtCreator but you quickly realize (assuming you were used to Lazarus-like tools, most developers actually do not realize that) you are working with something that was meant to be coded against instead of used with visual designers (which is kinda backwards IMO considering the "G" in GUIs and kinda remind me a quip about Motif back in the day about how its documentation was a bunch of volumes almost without any screenshot :-P). But if you want to do it right, you can't really work around the need for all these to be integrated with a unifying vision. Even Lazarus and Free Pascal, which are technically different projects, largely managed it because they basically did what Delphi already had done - and most of the warts when using Lazarus come from not being a truly integrated project like Delphi was, like issues with different FPC versions or relying on GDB as a debugger (which is the #1 source of debugging issues, fortunately there is a new debugger in works which can work as part of the IDE itself and personally find it to work fine, though it isn't enabled by default).

adiM 5y ago

I recently came across YAD (https://sourceforge.net/projects/yad-dialog/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/yad-dialog/), which is a improved version of dialog. Allows you to create a simple GUI, where all the entries are written to STDOUT. So, you can interface with your favorite language. For examples, see this page: http://smokey01.com/yad/ http://smokey01.com/yad/

danudey 5y ago
Note that the project hasn't been contributed to since 2017, and contains unfixed bugs from six years ago. Might be worth a fork or a rewrite.
- ducktective 5y ago
  It's active. Seems to have been moved to https://github.com/v1cont/yad https://github.com/v1cont/yad
  - adiM 5y ago
    I installed via AUR (which uses the right github link) and didn't notice that I was bookmarking the old version of the project. Thanks!

hkopp 5y ago

Gooey is a similar tool to Typer that I have bookmarked for such cases, but never had the opportunity to use it. https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey