4 ms·

I know I'm about to show my ignorance regarding GUI programming here, but: would SDL2 be a suitable choice? Or would that be too low-level? Or just...the wrong

I know I'm about to show my ignorance regarding GUI programming here, but: would SDL2 be a suitable choice? Or would that be too low-level? Or just...the wrong sort of library?

troad 1y ago
SDL2 wouldn't be appropriate for what they're trying to do. SDL2 is more of a drawing and graphics library. You tell it to put a triangle here, it puts a triangle there. But it has no idea what a button should look like - how it should behave, how it should be animated - on Mac, on Windows, on KDE, on Gnome, etc. You could try to painstakingly recreate this look and feel for each platform, but it's a lot of effort, you probably won't get it quite right, you'll make oversights on accessibility and internationalisation, and your hard work will instantly look dated once the platform evolves. To make native GUIs, you need to talk to the libraries that draw platform-native components, like buttons, for you. But of course each platform works totally differently, and the whole affair is honestly kind of a mess, which is why truly native cross-platform applications tend to be fairly rare in practice. Maintaining five different GUI code bases for all sorts of fringe platforms is not, in most cases, a good use of time. For most apps, either you stick to native and cut less significant platforms, or you abandon native altogether and just use a cross-platform wrapper like Electron.
bitwize 1y ago
Unless you plan on writing your entire UI from scratch, like, from the framebuffer on up (in which case it will integrate poorly with the rest of the desktop) you must use one of the common widget toolkits: GTK or Qt. If you want the flexibility of not having to commit to C++, GTK is your only choice.
t_mahmood 1y ago
Just from my basic understanding after working with sdl2 and gtk, sdl2 is more suitable for game development, It doesn't have standard set of UI elements. So every UI element, and interactions will have to be implemented by hand. Now imagine displaying a list view with huge number of items. And the worst is, Terminals works with texts, sdl2, in my knowledge do not have proper way to display large amount of text, let alone select and copy. There are probably other issues, these came from what I experienced

I know I'm about to show my ignorance regarding GUI programming here, but: would SDL2 be a suitable choice? Or would that be too low-level? Or just...the wrong sort of library?

troad 1y ago

SDL2 wouldn't be appropriate for what they're trying to do. SDL2 is more of a drawing and graphics library. You tell it to put a triangle here, it puts a triangle there. But it has no idea what a button should look like - how it should behave, how it should be animated - on Mac, on Windows, on KDE, on Gnome, etc. You could try to painstakingly recreate this look and feel for each platform, but it's a lot of effort, you probably won't get it quite right, you'll make oversights on accessibility and internationalisation, and your hard work will instantly look dated once the platform evolves. To make native GUIs, you need to talk to the libraries that draw platform-native components, like buttons, for you. But of course each platform works totally differently, and the whole affair is honestly kind of a mess, which is why truly native cross-platform applications tend to be fairly rare in practice. Maintaining five different GUI code bases for all sorts of fringe platforms is not, in most cases, a good use of time. For most apps, either you stick to native and cut less significant platforms, or you abandon native altogether and just use a cross-platform wrapper like Electron.

bitwize 1y ago

Unless you plan on writing your entire UI from scratch, like, from the framebuffer on up (in which case it will integrate poorly with the rest of the desktop) you must use one of the common widget toolkits: GTK or Qt. If you want the flexibility of not having to commit to C++, GTK is your only choice.

t_mahmood 1y ago

Just from my basic understanding after working with sdl2 and gtk, sdl2 is more suitable for game development, It doesn't have standard set of UI elements. So every UI element, and interactions will have to be implemented by hand. Now imagine displaying a list view with huge number of items. And the worst is, Terminals works with texts, sdl2, in my knowledge do not have proper way to display large amount of text, let alone select and copy. There are probably other issues, these came from what I experienced