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Comment by easrng | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, have you TRIED non-web, cross platform, UI dev? It's a nightmare. At least all the things I've tried so far are. I'm trying KDE's Qt IDE out and so far it seems much better at getting a working example built, though it looks like it's missing a visual interface editor. Qt-the-company had a good visual interface editor I used in ~2018 I think with PyQt but I can't find a way to launch it anymore. It's a mess.

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Qt Designer[0] (for widget-based interfaces) is still a thing, and they have added Qt Quick[1] and Qt Quick Controls (for QML-based interfaces).

Recently they’ve been integrated into the IDE but with a right click on a file (within the IDE file browser or project browser panes) you can open a .ui file in the external Designer.

[0]: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtdesigner-manual.html [1]: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-index.html

I am insanely productive writing desktop applications with wxPython+wxWize. No GUI designer, no XML, just straight up Python code that's easy to follow and easy to refactor. I can whip up a prototype as fast as I ever could in Delphi, and it transitions cleanly into the finished app.

I guess if cross-platform needs to include mobile, then that's not good enough. But for what it does, I'm very happy with it.

Full disclosure: wxWize is my own creation.

I have, since the days of 16 bit home computers where when I wanted ultimate performance it had to code the core of the application in straight Assembly.

The only platform that offers native RAD like tooling for Web Development is OutSystems, most don't come even close, probably WebFlow.

Naturally since most devs don't like to pay for their tools, their target market is enterprise shops, so only Fortune 500 devs get nice tooling.

The GUI designer is called Qt designer - it's called designer in Ubuntu/Debian. Unfortunately Debian has really made a mess of their packaging of Qt/PyQt. They've split up everything into tiny packages and their naming scheme seems crazy - I can never work out which package to install to get what I want. In this case it's qttools5-dev-tools.

Some of us don't think much of Qt either.

I have, and I found QtQuick and QML to be a better experience for reactive UI programming.

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