Comment by kretaceous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kretaceous | Hacker News Reader

I explored couple of methods to develope desktop/mobile GUI with Go a few weeks ago. These are some of them:

    1) Fyne (https://github.com/fyne-io/fyne)
    Popular. Native functionalities like trays, etc. Mobile app possible. Looks okay.
    
    2) Gio (https://gioui.org/)
    Looks okay. Customisable. Tailscale Mobile app is made with this.

    3) Wails (https://github.com/wailsapp/wails)
    Easy WebView for Go. 
    Lacks native functionalities.

    4) Sciter (https://sciter.com) embedded in Go
    Haven't explored much.

    5) Giu (https://github.com/AllenDang/giu)
    Based on Dear ImGui. Doesn't look very polished.

P.S. I settled on Gio for the mobile app and ditched the desktop app altogether.

Now that I'm poking harder at the mobile Tailscale app, the seams are starting to show. When I open the three-dots menu, it opens instantly without an animation. Tapping and dragging my finger off a menu item triggers it anyway, and tapping the "Expires" text at the top of the menu closes it the moment my finger lands (rather than when I release, or leaving the menu open).

Why not Gtk? It looks quite nice and has a great GUI designer. I used to do UI mock-ups with Glade just because I thought it was so well thought out.

All the GTK4 apps I know all exclusive to their specific platforms. Most of them are being made exclusively for GNOME. Some of them have been made exclusively for elementary. I'm not interested if it's technically possible to create DE and WM neutral GTK4 apps. I'm interested if neutral apps are being made, which they aren't, whatever the reasons may be.

I doubt it's a good choice for cross DE and WM apps on Linux, let alone cross platform apps.

Does GTK work for targetting mobile platforms, like your parent wanted?

GTK4 libadwaita has first-class mobile.

https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/mobile_adwaita/

https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2022/06/twig-46/

https://aplazas.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/blog/blog/2021/03/31/... (2021)

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