Windows Gui Frontend

[Michael Torrie]

On 4/2/23 05:09, Dietmar Schwertberger wrote:
> I also did evaluate all the GUI builder from time to time between
> 2000 and 2016 to find one that I could recommend to colleagues,
> but could not find one. Then I started contributing to wxGlade
> and I can say that since a few years it's as easy again to
> build GUIs as it was with VB6.
> 
> I don't want to go back to coding GUIs manually. For most use
> cases it's a waste of time and often it does not result in the
> best GUI as it's not so easy to try out and rearrange elements.

But any modern GUI toolkit has sizers and layout managers. If you're
manually placing elements you cannot deal with HiDPI or changing window
sizes.  Rearranging happens automatically when using sizers and layout
managers.

That said, the future of GUIs is declarative, using XAML or some other
domain-specific language like QML.  Examples of this include QtQuick
(the long-term direction Qt is heading), and the various dot Net GUI
toolkits now popular including MS' own MAUI, WPF, Avalonia.

GUI designer tools (Qt Creator, Visual Studio) can be used to assist and
help layout the skeleton, but ultimately the GUI is defined by code. And
it works very well, is adaptive, and can automatically size and
rearrange. If you want portability to mobile devices, this is where it's at.

I've tried wxGlade but never could get into it, or wxWidgets in general.
 I used to use GTK a lot and did use Glade back then, and dynamically
loaded the UI definition files at run time.  Lately used more Qt with
QtDesigner, and even extended Designer to support using some custom
widgets I made.

but the future of Qt is clearly QtQuick, so I've been learning that.
Has its warts, but in general I like the declarative paradigm.  It's a
learning curve.  Overall it's fairly powerful, flexible and portable.  I
have used the designer in Qt Creator a bit, but it's often faster and
just as intuitive to write it in QML, since you're going to be dropping
into QML frequently anyway to set properties (not unlike having to set
widget properties in Qt Designer.  So I guess it's 6s using the
graphical designer vs straight Qt.