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I’m looking into creating a small desktop GUI tool using something modern and cross platform.
So many of the tutorials assume you’re creating a business web app, and want to use an opinionated framework. “Obviously you want to use MVC/MVVM/Reactive/DI/virtual DOM/Providers/Notifiers/State management.”
No, I just want to hook a few buttons to fiddle with some data structures, thanks.
As suggested by others here, I think I'm going with PyQt/PySide. Flutter is good, but ends up being quite verbose for some of the simple things I'm doing, and the end result feels... nothing like a desktop app.
Yay for simple events and callbacks!
@bbbscarter This interests me though. What do you envision? If it can be condensed to fit here. :)
@SonnyBonds for small developer apps, imperative coding with callbacks/events is usually enough IMO - e.g. old style WinForms, wxWIdgets, Qt, etc. Godot's UI follows a similar paradigm. The extreme imperative version is an immediate mode UI like Dear ImGui.
Tutorials for things like Flutter, Avalonia, React, etc assume you want to build something that will scale, and are willing to shift your mental model to their particular paradigm - MVVM, provider+notifier, etc.
@bbbscarter Yeah I mostly agree. If you have good events you can usually hook up whatever model you need.
I've wanted to go more toward ImGUI lately but when I've tried actual ImGUI I haven't really loved it. I thing I prefer stateful structures. But they don't come without problems either.
@bbbscarter If you're making a cross platform GUI tool, I'd recommend using Qt. Use PyQt if you know Python and don't want to go C++.
Anything web-like is going to end up as a bonkers-size electron app.
@JeremiahFieldhaven @bbbscarter I came to the same conclusion.
PyQt is officially supported.
For JS fans, https://docs.nodegui.org/ might be worth a look.
@JeremiahFieldhaven Thanks! I've certainly done my share of C++ and Python. I've never loved them for GUI coding (mostly due to packaging issues with Python). Haven't tried Qt for a while.
I'm having fun with Flutter, which is now mostly doing what I want - but the tutorials emphasise the details of their particular flavour of declarative framework.
Same with Avalonia - “here are 5 examples filled with yummy MVVM boilerplate!”.
Honorable mention to Fyne - simple and clean.