alt Hacker NewsI think you are right and completely agree with most of your points.
> wxWidgets (seems that the community is very small and especially its bindings needed to be resurrected at least once)
Which is a damn shame because they are very close to native appearances on both macOS and Windows and are much easier to program than anything Qt. I think it’s the solution I prefer for multi platform GUIs, both as a user and as an occasional programmer.
> Electron or the other variants of 'browser component + JavaScript/CSS and callbacks to a local server
On the other hand, I absolutely hate this as a user. I would lose features and go back to the command line rather than having to deal with this. Everything is wrong in these applications, they don’t support standard keyboard shortcuts, they look weird and out of place and lag where you least expect it.
> TUIs are no solution to the core problem (and it would be absolutely possible to have a GUI toolkit with a TUI renderer for perhaps 80% of GUI needs)
There are a couple of TUI framework that are almost there already. I like the fact that they are useable without fuss over ssh and stuff but I think they are solving the wrong problem. I would rather use something like tmux but that sucks less for the windowing and persistence bits and get more focused and composable CLI. Make a simple REPL with readline so it has a standard and expected behaviour instead of trying to make everything look or behave like an IDE.
OTOH, I really like how this is driving improvement in terminal emulators.
Thank you very much, and I also agree with your points: Electron Apps simply never feel right, even if I work within them all day (VS Code for example).
I also agree, wxWidgets is quite great, although I have to also agree with the comment above, that C++ for a GUI library is just a PITA when used from any other language. AFAIK the consumers from wxWidget (wxPython, wxErlang?, ...) are using a C wrapper around the C++ wrapper to use it.