Recommend: IDE and GUI library

[Moritz Maxeiner via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Friday, 24 February 2017 at 22:44:55 UTC, XavierAP wrote:
> Hi I've looked at wiki.dlang.org/IDEs, and I see that Visual D 
> is linked from dlang.org/download.html. Still I was looking for 
> personal opinions and experiences beyond hard specs, I wonder 
> if one of the IDEs is already dominant at least for each OS for 
> any good reason.
>
> My requirements are quite ordinary: make x64, debug, go to 
> definition, manage projects, code completion. My platform is 
> Windows; interested if the choice would be different for Linux, 
> if the same nice, otherwise I'd prefer to use whatever is best 
> on each OS.

I use Visual Studio Code on Linux and macOS, not sure how the 
experience on Windows is, but I'd expect it to be the same. With 
the dlang extension[1], the usual development tools dcd, dfmt, 
dscanner, dfix (see code.dlang.org for these), and the native 
debug extension[2] all your requirements are covered. After the 
setup everything has been working smoothly and I'm very happy 
with it.
The *only* little gripe about it is that Visual Studio Code uses 
the Electron framework and drains about 10-20% more power than 
e.g. neovim, though the comparison is apples vs oranges.

>
> And second question, is DWT the de facto standard for creating 
> GUIs? Or are there good competitors.

AFAIK there is no standard in creating GUIs with D. I suppose if 
any one of them has what it takes to take that position in the 
future it'd be dlangui[3], but considering the issue tracker and 
the manpower available that'll likely still take a while.
In the meantime I personally use dqml[4] (QtQuick 2.0 bindings) 
since I like MVC, and this allows me to write application logic 
and model in D, visual in QML, and controller in JS (and this 
also allows me to swap out the application core without changing 
a single line in the QML or JS).

>
> Sorry if I'm asking something too obvious, though I've looked 
> around for answers before.

If it's obvious, I missed it myself; I pretty much tried out all 
the GUI/TUI things on code.dlang.org until I found something I 
liked.

[1] https://github.com/dlang-vscode/dlang-vscode
[2] https://github.com/WebFreak001/code-debug
[3] https://github.com/buggins/dlangui
[4] https://github.com/filcuc/dqml