there need to be more GUI frameworks that simply allow you to Make A GUI with no bullshit

• I don’t want to play videos inside the GUI
• I don’t need a ButtonBuilderQueryProxyFactory
• I don’t want to embed HTML/CSS/JS inside of the GUI
• I don’t want to make an entire video game inside the GUI
• I don’t want to restyle every UI element until it’s a 1:1 screen-accurate recreation of LCARS from Star Trek
• I don’t want or need a canvas for drawing arbitrary pixels inside the GUI
• I don’t want to place any UI elements diagonally or upside-down or any other weird shit
• I don’t want a 600MB behemoth framework that covers every possible use case and is now impossible for anyone to understand

I want buttons and radio boxes and tabs and maybe a menu bar. and I want to put them in one of two types of containers:

• horizontal containers
• vertical containers
• maybe a grid container if I’m feeling fancy

that means I don’t need or want to read a 30-paragraph essay on your UI control reflow screen size update flex position system because the most advanced thing I’ll ever want to do is place a button horizontally to the left of a label

and I literally do not care what any of the UI elements look like as long as the font is big enough for me to read

and there are shockingly few ways to Make A GUI without getting far into the weeds with this overengineered bullshit

@kasdeya I find that immediate mode gui libs tend to generally be more no-bullshit 🤔 aside from the APIs obviously being much simpler.

@kasdeya sounds like what every second video game reinvents itself.

@follpvosten ooh good to know! those are GUIs that create a window with a canvas and then directly draw pixels to the canvas, right? as opposed to using existing system APIs for creating the GUI

@kasdeya basically, yeah; because they are, beyond some caching and optimisations, kinda constantly redrawing everything, they’re mostly found embedded inside of video games (also because they’re so easy to embed due to being simple), and more rarely in powerful apps that use a lot of cpu anyway, like video editors and such.
they work just as well on their own though; as a crab person, I like egui a lot, the most commonly used option outside of that world would be dear imgui :)

@follpvosten that is really good to know - thank you! I feel like I’ve seen imgui everywhere lol - especially when modding other games - so I might give that a look and see if there are any bindings for languages that I like

@kasdeya good luck, I hope this works out for you!

@kasdeya Have you ever played with Delphi? It's been a few years for me, but it was pretty minimalist and compiled to single-file executables on Win/Linux without a zillion-MB runtime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKzm98J11x4

@ricko ooh I love that you can make a GUI graphically in this IDE! Delphi looks like a really weird language lol but I might give this a look - thanks for the suggestion!

@kasdeya @follpvosten
> Among other things, full internationalization (right-to-left text, bidirectional text, text shaping etc.) and accessibility features are not supported.

:(

@ww @follpvosten yeah… unfortunately I have yet to find a GUI framework that isn’t extremely complex and frustrating to use, that also has accessibility features

@kasdeya @follpvosten i think it's fundamentally a complex problem tbh

@ww @kasdeya egui has support for „AccessKit“ which is far as I can tell only helps with the Windows and macOS accessibility APIs…and they’ve been discussing and experimenting with switching to a better text rendering solution that would enable stuff like rtl for…years at this point… 🥴

@kasdeya There are a few like that, but the ones I know mostly fail to provide accessibility support in exchange.

For stuff meant for my own use and no one else's that's mostly fine, but it's a bit awkward otherwise.

@ww @kasdeya @follpvosten The closest, so far, seems to be Tk.

It has recently added that. Though I suppose one could say it isn't quite as smol & simple as it once used to be.

And yes, accessibility is complicated and getting it right more so. That's part of why smaller toolkits tend not to have it, as it tends to require a distinct skillset the current devs may not have.