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Comment by Wyndtroy2012 | Hacker News Reader

Wyndtroy2012

Given the other applications you chose to look at, I'm surprised you didn't also look at Audacity. It uses wxWidgets, which is a nice C++ cross-platform GUI framework. It wraps native controls on each platform it supports, and also has a "Generic" variant where it draws its own. It's not very heavy as these things go, and has a nice python binding called wxPython.

I'd check it out before rolling my own :)

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By personal experience, wxWindows is "OK", but it's not a panacea. There are a ton of little quirks that will burn you when doing cross-platform development simply because native controls do not behave in the same way. HiDpi is a major pain with wxWindows (but then again, the way HiDpi is managed is a pain irrespective of the toolkit).

But if you do some forms and basic UI controls, wxWindows does the job egregiously. Looks the way it should be on all platforms.

It's funny an article from 2016 mentions issues about text rendering, because certainly we've been regressing in this area. I can spot QML and Electron apps by the broken text rendering alone. FF60+ with quantum has incorrect subpixel hinting and does not correctly hint at all sometimes.

Many of the mentioned apps int the article are "broken" in my eyes: I don't have perfect vision, and I do expect apps to follow the system text scaling (and they don't). For a "broken by design" example, see Darktable, which is awesome, and should do this by default, but the authors hard-coded a theme where literally every widget is styled for looks and not for function.

Nobody speaks about how the widgets should feel and interact, but that's exactly what feels off about "GTK" on windows or macos. QML, Electron and partly GTK3 brings that feeling to all platforms. My biggest letdown is QML, as many QT developers see it as the future so it has a larger adoption than it should have.

It breaks just about any rule in the book: poor behavior on any platform, noticeably slower, style not consistent with the platform, broken scrolling, broken text editing, broken text rendering...

> But if you do some forms and basic UI controls, wxWindows does the job egregiously. Looks the way it should be on all platforms.

Word choice? "Egregiously" means "Conspicuously bad or offensive." [0] The context suggests you intended to say "adequate for the purpose," for which "competently" is the correct term.[1]

[0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/egregiously

[1] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/competently

I though he was being clever; "egregiously" means "in a manner consistent with being out of the herd". Bad or offensive for the goat-herd maybe, but perhaps not for the goat.

Thanks, I had a completely different meaning for this word in mind!

I also did. Given the Latin root (ēgregius, outstanding), I feel the pejorative connotation is out of place. The Italian term egregio definitely has a positive meaning, as it's also used to address people in letters.

I have filed numerous bug reports about Chrome's broken text rendering and hinting and had them closed as won't fix because they're too difficult to fix (note: not too difficult to reproduce, just too difficult to fix). I can't believe how low priority the correct displaying of the most important content in the window is to web browser developers.

Why does electron have broken text rendering? Surely the Chrome browser’s tendering does a good job? Or do you mean something like “it doesn’t match system defaults”?

Visual Studio Code on macOS right now has broken font rendering, since it uses Skia via Electron instead of macOS' native font rendering.

It's fixed in upstream Electron but until a fixed version is integrated into VSCode I have to live with (months of) broken font rendering.

It even makes me want to use Xcode somewhat. For all its flaws, its font rendering is just the system (working) one, and scrolling in Xcode is actually smooth 60fps instead of the laggy mess that is VSCode.

Not matching system settings (not just defaults, but the setting, i set the settings for a reason) is broken!

This. It's a bug to use a different text renderer than the system, because it will never look the same and with text this is very noticeable and irritating even to some people. You do _not_ want your core visual to be irritating.

> Surely the Chrome browser’s tendering does a good job?

it has always looked terrible to me when comparing to other desktop apps. All the fonts look more blurry.

Since many years I made a few application using wxWidgets, and the macOS part can have issues. While it's ok regarding the size of the app (in term of MB) you still drag and extensive library.

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