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bvan

Looks better than any Python GUI framework I’ve seen..

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It uses LVGL https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl

Oh that explains why it's fast!

LVGL... fast? It's used on meshtastic devices, and I've always felt it was rather clunky. /shrug

Is it possible to make a fast UI on say, an ESP32?

Wish I knew... I'm half way towards looking for companies who make white label android devices for a project of mine... I originally wanted to go stm32, but as soon as you add a touchscreen and want a responsive gui, my only options seemed like "smart displays" with pre-rendered ui graphics, or a full blown arm device. /shrug

Now I am curious what you're working on :-)

Well it runs at 20 Mhz, like a Motorola 68020 (Apollo DomainOS), so I would say, yes.

Microsoft has difficulties drawing (rounded) rectangles at 2 - 4 GHz but that's another issue.

But Motorola 68k in say... the Amiga (I don't know Apollo) would have additional chips for sprites and blitting, right? And the ESP - despite being extremely fast, doesn't have that extra support. So you need CPU... + tricks, DMA, triple buffering etc

Where are you getting 20MHz from? The OG ESP32 is a dual-core 240MHz micro...

I've been looking into this recently. It seems to be possible with the right kind of controller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWtTmmne6Bo

Also the newer esp32-p4s have MIPI DSI onboard which apparently can do smooth HD.

Yes, see MS-DOS games. Now skills to do it 30 years later is another matter.

Is it possible though? I have never seen an LVGL demo (just plain C) able to present a demo or animation that is as "smooth" as a MS-DOS game on say a 486. Not that the 486 was butter smooth but it's not quite there. Maybe its the interface for the screen?

I reckon you've never seen flet.

https://flet.dev

That looks interesting. I had not heard of flet.

How do you like it? How easy is it to work withe the layout controls?

It's a mixed bag, as it's still not stable (esp as very recently declarative support was added in what was likely a mostly-rewrite). But when it works, it works great (I've only tried on Linux and Android).

Neat. I'm skimming the documentation now and it looks like something worth keeping an eye on.

I have so many long-running scripts that I sometimes set up with TUIs or quick PyQt/PySide GUIs but the GUIs always seem overkill and the TUIs always leave me lacking. flet looks like a good in-between of the two.

I'd say it definitely makes building GUIs more simple and intuitive than the Qt and Tk frameworks at least. And very important for me, it's fully cross-platform (for the most popular platforms anyway). I must admit that the imperative style does start to become painful as complexity increases, which led to me dropping it for a while, and so the declarative update is welcome even though it takes some time for me to mentally grep.

How does it compare to Beeware?

Far easier to use. I never got beyond just trying to setup Beeware; became overwhelmed by complexity. Flet, you install it like any other Python package and start coding your UI. It's one of those rare things that just works(tm).

Can we port it to Intel, I wonder...?

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