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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

The same for a MS-DOS Clipper [1] application written 30 years ago. Sorry, with all due respect to the wxWidgets contributors, aesthetically wxWidgets (like many other UI libs) is not for 2022.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_(programming_language)

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Users care a lot less about looks than designers and PMs (seem to) wish they did.

They like consistent, reliable, fast operation. Especially those first two things.

The things that make them most unhappy are: 1) programs that behave unpredictably—a predictable, consistent bug that happens every single time is preferable to an operation that fails 5% of the time, randomly, or a button that fails to register about half of all clicks, or anything like that and 2) changes to an interface they've already learned—because your new thing probably isn't 1/10 as "intuitive" as you think it is, so it's just another annoying arbitrary thing they have to deal with for no good reason, when they already had the last annoying, arbitrary thing figured out.

Now, where it might make a difference (maybe—but I'm skeptical) is screenshots on sales pages. Which I suppose is why design continues to be so anti-user.

> aesthetically wxWidgets (like many other UI libs) is not for 2022

wxWidgets applications are supposed to look native on every platform... what's the issue? Personally, I find apps with weird GUIs that don't look at all like the rest of the system very irritating. I would prefer developers to spend more time implementing features, and less making bling-bling UI things.

> I would prefer developers to spend more time implementing features, and less making bling-bling UI things.

So many apps twenty years ago had features that apps today do not. It was really frustrating to see instant messaging services regress in features as people migrated from one to another to a third to ... today's dumpster fires.

Using the native UI libs doesn't mean you have native UX experience. It is not only about the visual objects but also the interactions and flow.

But it just wraps the native controls...? You're effectively saying that native controls are not for 2022...

I'm guessing OP meant it doesn't look like material ui.

A serious question: what are native controls on Windows? Is the Windows XP era where each control is its own HWND (and usually drawn with GDI+)? Is it Windows 7 era where the drawing is Direct2D? Windows 8 where the elements of the app come together with DirectComposition? Or maybe Windows 10 style which is an evolution of UWP (now rebranded WinUI), with drawing in Win2D?

For lightweight utilities, I think the user32 controls (HWND per control, drawn with GDI) are still a reasonable choice. That's the one GUI toolkit that's guaranteed to already be in the working set on all versions of Windows, thus minimizing the impact on startup time and memory footprint. Do those controls just look hideous to modern users? I obviously can't judge that for myself. Or is there a problem with the way they render text on high-DPI displays?

It used to be they didn't render high-dpi text correctly, but fixes went in for that. Even so, it's a hack and often not pixel perfect. If you're trying to do visually sophisticated things (soft shadows, fading animations), GDI+ is inadequate. So basically it looks antiquated. It might be fine for simple form-like programs.

My main point is that "native" covers a lot of ground, and "native legacy compatibility" and "native modern" are radically different technology stacks on Windows.

The HWND-based ones that come with Windows would be the native controls as this is how the underlying window system works. The WPF/UWP/etc UI stacks are built on top of HWND stuff pretty much the same way as Java Swing or JavaFX were made that largely (especially the latter) ignore the underlying window system.

Of course since they come with the OS you might as well use those instead of bundling a separate UI toolkit, but IMO if you consider them as native as the HWND stuff then might as well consider everything native - AFAIK Windows even comes with a shared Electron/Chromium instance applications can use so in that case you could say anything that uses Electron is native on Windows :-P.

UWP is most definitely not HWND per control, and doing so would be incredibly limiting. I don't know the UWP (WinUI) internals, but on mac it's generally a CALayer per widget, and Core Animation is doing the compositing. On Windows, the Windows 8 equivalent is DirectComposition, but I think the WinRT Windows.UI.Composition interface has some capabilities not exposed through winapi.

It isn't HWND per control indeed, it does its own composition, hence why i mentioned Swing and JavaFX with an "especially the latter" in parentheses (but Swing also does bypass the underlying window system aside from the toplevel stuff for per-control functionality whenever that'd make sense).

Another question: what are native controls on Linux? Qt on KDE? Gtk on Gnome? Gtk2, Gtk3, or Gtk4? Or make your own X11 widgets?

You forgot GTK5 :) . Xaw3d is the best.

I did not know about those

Qt on KDE and the appropriate GTK version on Gnome, yes.

In practice, Qt looks much more native on Gnome than GTK does on KDE so you should go with Qt.

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