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> The entire experience would not be so bad if I could write my app entirely in Cpp.

You can.

Qt + KDE libraries are really nice.

You can’t, you must use Qml.

You used to be able to with QtWidgets but a modern KDE app cannot be written with QtWidgets. And QtWidgets are in life support.

When you say "cannot be written", what do you mean?

You are free to write one, and it works. I have a few internal tools that do not touch QML or the XML ui system, and it still builds just fine with then latest libraries on Arch.

Of course an upstream KDE application might not be written that way, if that's what you are complaining about.

It is plain wrong. Most KDE applications are written in QWidgets.

Seems like some use XML to compose the UI?

Qt Designer .ui files I guess, these are used to generate C++ (QWidgets) code that isn't substantially worse than hand-written. There is also KXmlGui, but that is a rather particular thing IIRC mostly about merging menus from plugins and about permissions.

What's the source for this?

Edit: just browsed some of the docs for current KDE libs and I see a lot of QWidget-derived custom widgets in there. I don't see how this stuff couldn't be used in a pure C++ codebase.

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