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Comment by Broussebar | Hacker News Reader

I used Shoes two (edit: three according to git) years ago to build a small software[1]. At the time there was a version 4 ongoing heavy development based on top of JRuby but I think it’s in the same state. The version 3.3 listed here has been officially abandoned by the sole developer. At the time they wrote a blog article about stopping the project but the blog is not available anymore (it’s the link in the description of the project [2]).

Already two years ago shoes 3.3 was crashing a lot unexpectedly so I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious. But if you want to access the documentation online I made a small website for that [3]. The official documentation is only available in the executable which isn’t great to browse.

- [1] https://gitlab.com/png-glitch/legacy-glitched-factory

- [2] https://github.com/shoes/shoes3

- [3] https://radoteur.frama.io/shoes-unofficial-documentation/

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> At the time they wrote a blog article about stopping the project but the blog is not available anymore (it’s the link in the description of the project

http://web.archive.org/web/20211205200902/https://walkabout....

>> As you have guessed by now, I’m not maintaining Shoes 3 anymore. I do still answer some questions on github but nothing new is likely. I owe you an explanation of why. It’s pretty simple. My health is bad and is not going to get better.

That snipit's a little misleading without the follow-on next sentence:

> The Shoes community (Shoes 3 or Shoes 4) is not growing and there is little enjoyment in working on code that no one else cares about enough to help code the internals. The underlying technology employed is evolving in ways that run counter to what Shoes is and does. It’s just time to quit. We had fun, we learned some things and we’ll leave it at that.

And then a lot of text about wandering off into home automation, Arduino, and 3D printers.

What might you suggest as an alternative? PySimpleGUI? Tk?

Just a heads up: PySimpleGUI 5 isn't open source any more [0], and the official GitHub repo was replaced with a stub [1]. From the blog post, it sounds like the people behind it will probably remove the FOSS version from PyPI soon.

It's possible the community will fork it with a version of PySimpleGUI 4 that's still kicking around, but I haven't seen one yet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369353

[1] https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI

Sad days

Oh, this isn't good. It was one of the better options available, and the only one of those which was FOSS.

I'm the perfect target user for something like this -- long time "scientific" programmer, who is sometimes asked to create a useful little app for a limited audience. Nothing I write will ever see the light of day as a software product.

I use Tkinter. It was not hard to learn at all, and while it's not comprehensive, it gets enough stuff done. And it comes with the "vanilla" Python istall.

What I did with Tkinter, starting more than a decade ago, was to create my own little "wrapper" that simplified things even further. Each of my little functions or objects incorporates what I've learned about a widget and imposes a default -- ugly but functional -- layout. That way, I never have to look it up again.

So is it using swing under the hood? Is that the reason it is JRuby?

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