Like the author I too did an evaluation of various UI frameworks, though I ended up settling on WTL (Win32 with some ATL). I might switch away from it and make

Like the author I too did an evaluation of various UI frameworks, though I ended up settling on WTL (Win32 with some ATL). I might switch away from it and make my own Win32 wrapper in time but for now it works well enough and writing custom controls that feel like standard controls is relatively easy. If you handle the drawing correctly it is also one of the fastest and snappiest systems around. I had the exact same issues with WinUI3, where each time I compiled and wanted to run the application I had to install it into Windows, with its own start menu entry and registry entries and all that stuff. Really inconvenient and not worth it unless you like and desire that "new app" look of the Settings etc. Qt wasn't too bad but you still had to do a similar install step within CMake to make the necessary Qt DLLs available to your application to run it. It's also not the fastest system around for UI.