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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

You mean three native desktop apps.

Qt /thread

Qt is not native.

Native doesn't mean "it's not written in JS" or "it's fast". Native means "it uses the GUI toolkit of the target platform". And Qt doesn't do that, it merely mimics its appearance.

You are incorrect. Toolkits like Qt are exactly what people are talking about when they say "native". How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives? Did you even know they exist? How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.

> How many apps do you think still use X11 graphic primitives?

Good question. Let's see, what are the GUI programs that I use every day... Emacs, exwm (separate X client so I guess it counts even if elisp), st, chromium, mpv, mupdf, conky. That's 6 out of 7, so I guess the answer is most of them?

(Emacs is built with --without-x-toolkit)

Hmm, I do not consider an Qt app on macOS to be native.

>How many programs use native Win32 controls? Not even Microsoft does that anymore.

So because Microsoft has lowered the bar, now everything can be called "native"? There's a reason many people hate UWP.

Not using native Win32 HWND based controls does not imply UWP. Virtually every program that was made for Windows XP and later does not use native Win32 controls; this includes “outdated” frameworks like WinForms.

X11 and Win32 UI are actually fairly similar in this respect.

Actually the VCL[1], shipped with Delphi, does to a large extent use the native Win32 controls. They've added some quality of life stuff on top of them, but the TEdit component[2] is a wrapper around the Win32 edit control etc.

Delphi is not so popular these days, but there still is a fair share of Delphi programs running.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Component_Library

[2]: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Seattle/en/Vcl.StdC...

Which is the native GUI toolkit of Linux/UNIX? Athena? Motif? GTK+?

None, unfortunately. You have X11, but nobody uses that anymore.

Yeah, the question was tongue in cheek. Which one do we use then?

I guess the best option is GTK+ because of the number of users?

There are themes that mimic GTK apps on Qt and vice versa and they look like crap.

But in my opinion Qt apps also look like crap on Windows and Mac. They look somewhat like a native app, but everything is off.

For example, if you have a Qt app on Windows and you click a menu separator, the menu closes, <s>like it would do on Mac</s>. On Windows, clicking a menu separator should do nothing, the menu should remain open. There are dozens of little annoyances like that. Not to mention padding/spacing of elements, etc.

Of course, Qt is very useful. I've worked with it (using QWidgets) and I've liked it a lot, despite of its drawbacks. But it's certainly not native. It merely emulates the target interface.

I'm reading this on a Mac; I clicked on the File menu in Safari, then clicked a menu separator, and the menu remained open.

This does not, of course, invalidate your main point in any way. (I also currently have p4v open on another display, and, well.)

GTK isn't any more "native" than Qt -- they're both abstractions atop X (or Wayland, or Broadway).

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