3 ms·

What other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and Linux?

by pjc50 1y ago

exasperaited 1y ago
This is the painful truth, isn't it? IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.) Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these days, and its native affordances are fairly good. But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.
- asyncze 1y ago
  [dead]
gopher_space 1y ago
Godot looks ok and is surprisingly easy to work with.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?
  - gopher_space 1y ago
    The Godot editor is written in Godot. The look and feel of the editor is set up to be familiar to people working with 3D, but you're using a 2D* desktop application and all of the parts work responsively. I've been playing around with different GUI approaches for the desktop, and what impresses me the most about Godot is how lightweight and self-contained it can be while still being cross-platform on both ends.
nurumaik 1y ago
If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web ui left at all
- HumanOstrich 1y ago
  I'm not sure how you went from terminal and editor GPU rendering, which can benefit from it, to "there will soon be no web ui left at all".
- matsz 1y ago
  > VSCode already renders terminal on GPU When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js. Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
  - jcheng 1y ago
    Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both every day and never noticed any difference.
  - nurumaik 1y ago
    Enabled by default since about a year > GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-acceleration https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-...
    - Tyriar 1y ago
      It's actually been the default since v1.55 which released early April 2021: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-is-the-new-default https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-... Before that from v1.17 (~October 2017) it was using a 2d canvas context: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-renderer https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...
- morganherlocker 1y ago
  > If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage. I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files: - Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB - Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB update: I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
throwaway2037 1y ago
This question is so easy to answer: Qt! Signed by: Person who frequently shills for Qt on HN. :)
- asyncze 1y ago
  [dead]
- pjc50 1y ago
  Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of? (I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
  - rubymamis 1y ago
    I would plug my note-taking app written in Qt C++ and QML: https://get-notes.com https://get-notes.com.

What other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and Linux?

by pjc50 1y ago

What other UI framework looks as good on Windows, Mac and Linux?

This is the painful truth, isn't it? IMO The next best cross-platform GUI framework is Qt (FreeCAD, QGIS, etc.) Qt6 can look quite nice with QSS/QStyle themes, these days, and its native affordances are fairly good. But it's not close. VSCode is nice-looking, to me.

asyncze 1y ago
[dead]

gopher_space 1y ago

Godot looks ok and is surprisingly easy to work with.

pjc50 1y ago
Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of?
- gopher_space 1y ago
  The Godot editor is written in Godot. The look and feel of the editor is set up to be familiar to people working with 3D, but you're using a 2D* desktop application and all of the parts work responsively. I've been playing around with different GUI approaches for the desktop, and what impresses me the most about Godot is how lightweight and self-contained it can be while still being cross-platform on both ends.

nurumaik 1y ago

If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web ui left at all

HumanOstrich 1y ago
I'm not sure how you went from terminal and editor GPU rendering, which can benefit from it, to "there will soon be no web ui left at all".
matsz 1y ago
> VSCode already renders terminal on GPU When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js. Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
- jcheng 1y ago
  Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both every day and never noticed any difference.
- nurumaik 1y ago
  Enabled by default since about a year > GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-acceleration https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-...
  - Tyriar 1y ago
    It's actually been the default since v1.55 which released early April 2021: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-is-the-new-default https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-... Before that from v1.17 (~October 2017) it was using a 2d canvas context: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-renderer https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...
morganherlocker 1y ago
> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage. I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files: - Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB - Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB update: I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!

throwaway2037 1y ago

This question is so easy to answer: Qt! Signed by: Person who frequently shills for Qt on HN. :)

asyncze 1y ago
[dead]
pjc50 1y ago
Could you suggest an example such application we can try / look at screenshots of? (I've been aware of Qt for like two decades; back in the early 2000s my employer was evaluating such options as Tk, wxWindows, and ultimately settled on Java, I think with AWT. Qt seems to have a determined survival niche in "embedded systems that aren't android"?)
- rubymamis 1y ago
  I would plug my note-taking app written in Qt C++ and QML: https://get-notes.com https://get-notes.com.