wanting to try a GUI toolkit: needing some advice on which one to choose

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Thursday, 27 May 2021 at 01:17:44 UTC, someone wrote:
> - like a simple classical UI: favored over any modern one:

My minigui is a thing of beauty. Behold:

http://arsdnet.net/minigui-linux.png
http://arsdnet.net/minigui-sprite.png

its docs:
http://dpldocs.info/experimental-docs/arsd.minigui.html

It is quick to open and quick to compile (the whole thing is 
contained in just three source file that build from scratch in 
about a quarter second).

Pity is sucks. More below.

> - using the GTK toolkit within D requires the GTKD binding 
> library.

Well, you don't strictly have to use gtkd, you can always just 
extern(C) define the stuff yourself (or only use them from gtkd's 
generated files) and call them. But if you do use gtk, I'd 
suggest just sticking to the gtkd wrapper.

But I hate gtk so I made my own thing from scratch on nothing but 
X which might amuse you. (I loathe that useless wayland trash and 
will never support it. X is so much better.)

However my text edit widget sucks. It barely works. Really slow 
and buggy. I've been slowly trying to find the time to rewrite it 
but wow the text edit is harder than literally everything else 
combined and since I have so many other things to do it still 
sucks. I have been doing a bit of a 2.0 rewrite lately (recent 
blogs: 
http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_05_03.html 
and 
http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_05_17.html 
describe it, though the doc link from before has info too)

So I probably wouldn't seriously recommend my thing right now on 
Linux. (On Windows, it is fine - it just uses the OS-provided 
control. But you don't care about Windows so that's irrelevant... 
unless you wanna wine.)


Ironically the biggest thing I changed in the recent 2.0 work is 
a style delegate that makes it possible to do some kind of css 
thing. But since I also think css is bloated I'm just putting 
hooks in the core so it is an optional feature, just like the xml 
and script stuff. Turns out that was easier than fixing text 
bugs. And besides people love their dark modes lol.


Anyway if you can stand gtk, gtkd really isn't bad and its text 
widget works. Just don't use the file dialog lololol.