Built on Electron? Hard pass. The scourge of the modern age.
edit: just looked into the linked discussion: "The gzipped tar for this is 90MB. It's 265MB unzipped."
This is madness.
Yeap, even Sparta would bow down to a 265 MB terminal app.
Give it up. The ship has sailed.
I like native apps as much as anyone else but you've got to realise the absolute clusterfuck that is cross-platform development. Plus building rich GUIs is actually feasible when using tools that are actually meant to build rich GUIs (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS).
And it's only going to get better. Tauri's promising. I don't know any more than the next punter what the future will be, but my own guess would be web tech getting more significant in desktop UIs, not less. The combinatorial explosion of multiple OSs plus fragmentation of UI toolkits on each desktop platform seems to make web UIs a likely continuing target of choice for many apps. No-one will stop using software they like or need because someone they will never meet dupes a sneer about it on the internet.
TCL/Tk
You had me until this part. If those 3 were meant to build rich GUIs we wouldn't have new JS frameworks and a load of bundling tools coming out every year. They were meant to give documents structure and style, that's it. We molded them into the monstrosity they are today.
The appeal is not that they're a pleasure making GUIs with, it's that you go through the nightmare once and it works everywhere, rather than going through 3 different nightmares.
These were never meant to build rich UIs. They were meant to build a text page with a few images. That's it.
There's a reason why every single UI framework for these tools re-invents the same primitive controls like avatars and tabs.
The most feature-complete and flexible GUI framework is one that is:
- flexible. The web is anything but. You can read, for example, how Figma struggled and how inflexible the web is here: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
- feature-complete. Once again, there's a reason all UI projects for this "most feature-complete framework" keep reinventing the most primitive controls. Because the web has none, and creating complex controls is a near-impossibility. Also, if it was feature complete, https://open-ui.org/ wouldn't exist.
If you are actually looking for a flexible feature-complete GUI framework, then it's Qt.
That said, although I haven't tried Tabby so have a slightly open mind on that particular case, terminals seem like the wrong use for web tech. There's no shortage of native terminals on any platform.