Is UI interesting for us?

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Saturday, 25 March 2023 at 10:03:29 UTC, Ikey Doherty wrote:
> Is there general interest in UI within the D community?

As in most fields, I've done my own thing in my minigui.d. My 
general strategy has been on Windows, it uses the native controls 
where possible so things just work there, then the Linux version 
is 100% custom (and almost all self-contained, since I don't 
wanna bring in annoying outside libs).

This has some interesting effects: some surface level things are 
easier to do on linux but the deeper things are... more possible 
but less realistic.

Accessibility is one example, on Windows it mostly just works. I 
tested it with nvda and such, the basic classes - being built on 
native controls - work fine. Custom widgets of course nothing 
yet. On Linux, it just plain doesn't work at all. I expect it'd 
be possible to tie into gtk's api or something but i just have 
zero familiarity with it. I've glanced down the docs, I think I 
can do it, but that's as far as I've gotten.

But doing things myself on linux has also been interesting. I'm 
told that doing per-monitor fractional scaling is completely 
impossible. Gtk does not seem to support it. I do. It wasn't even 
that hard, so I don't get what the fuss is about...

On the other hand, it took me *ages* to get mixed font text 
layout right (and I still haven't done all the bidi stuff yet 
though I'm pretty confident my newer api will work fine for 
it).... and surprisingly, I found getting scroll bars right was a 
huge pain. Maybe that's just me, but between font bugs and scroll 
bugs, my text edit control, well, sure it worked, but it was a 
bit of an embarrassment for *years* on linux. Whereas on Windows, 
of course, it Just Worked from day one thanks to the OS providing 
it.

Then there's the case of the API and this is one place where we 
can innovate a little in D, though I've mostly been keeping it 
actually more-or-less a clone of the web dom api in javascript 
<http://dpldocs.info/experimental-docs/arsd.minigui.Event.html#details>. But a few fun things like reflecting over a struct to generate accessors that trigger updates automatically:

http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2020_11_02.html#the-user-side

Or dialog boxes and menus and such pulled out of simple function 
definitions (which I've been doing for websites for... golly 12 
years now lol):

http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2023_01_16.html#batch-programs


Which I've been very happy with sprinkling around, even while 
keeping the core a very traditional oop class set. It is nice 
when you just do like


---
                 @menu("&Edit") {
                         void Envelope_Patterns() {
                                 auto e = new Window("Envelope 
Patterns", 70 * 4, 70 * 4);
                                 new EnvelopeChooser(e);
                                 e.show();
                         }

                         @accelerator("F1")
                         void Speed_Down() {
                                 auto sid = 
chooser.getSelection()-1;
                                 auto sd = 
editableData.songData(sid, 0);
                                 sd[2] = cast(ubyte) --speed; // 
speed
                                 Update();
                         }

                         @accelerator("F2")
                         void Speed_Up() {
                                 auto sid = 
chooser.getSelection()-1;
                                 auto sd = 
editableData.songData(sid, 0);
                                 sd[2] = cast(ubyte) ++speed; // 
speed
                                 Update();
                         }

                 static string lastMidiFile;
                 @menu("Track") {
                         void 
Import_From_Midi(FileName!(lastMidiFile, ["Midi 
files\0*.mid;*.midi;*.rmi"]) file) {

              .........
---

and it magically creates the appropriate windows and dialog 
boxes. Or calling a function:

---
         dialog((NewSpecies ns) {
               // use the ns var here
         });
---

saves a bunch of boilerplate.