GUI libraries

[Chris]

On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 14:14:08 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-11-29 14:53, Chris wrote:
>
>> It's not about emulating. It's about innovating.
>
> Qt tries to emulate the native toolkit, like it or not.

I don't think it's necessary to do that. You actually only need a 
small set of widgets (text fields, buttons, menus, tabs etc.) The 
rest is just for show (and to tie programmers to one particular 
platform!). Swing is a good example. There are excellent UI apps 
written in Swing that run everywhere. I use jEdit a lot (not 
exclusively but again and again), and it has everything you need. 
A big advantage is cross-platform consistency. I think this is an 
issue that is under-estimated. This is why I like Textadept and 
jEdit.

Native behavior can still be added as in

version (Windows) {
   menuInWindow;
   preferencesIn("Tools (or Edit?)");
}

version (OSX) {
   menuNotInWindow;
   preferencesIn("Preferences ...");
}

A small set of native interfaces (but no dependence on them!).