We’ve lost so much ground since vb6.
For a while, I missed the ability to draw interfaces, and tried some tools for building interfaces in Python, but they all added too much overhead and complexity compared to VB6.
Then I realized: My interfaces will never be beautiful. Whether I can draw a layout that's better than random, or worse, is a coin toss. Instead, I wrote a simple "wrapper" around commonly used Tkinter widgets, allowing me to build an interface in one line of code per widget, and my wrapper just lays them out in order from top to bottom. That, plus Matplotlib graphs, which are heavenly.
Today, nobody uses my programs because the interface is beautiful. They need a problem solved, and the top-down layout is usually as good if not better than anything I could dream up myself. It's actually liberating.
There's still Lazarus[1], and Common Lisp got CLOG [2] which is very much like Delphi except in the web and in Lisp
[1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [2] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog
- https://ttkbootstrap.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#sample-themes
- https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/List+of+ttk+Themes#60ca3eb80e...
- https://ttkthemes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/themes.html
The main issue with Tk/Ttk is mostly documentation and of course that it's a classic GUI framework, not a 3D-GPU-layer-based framework suitable for highly animated and composited UIs.
There's a bunch of stuff that you really wanna know about but simply isn't included in the Python docs, and the real API docs are for Tcl and you need to understand how those tclisms map over to Python.
Those combo boxes are definitely not native. The menus are also off (the menu items are shorter and they turn blue instead of gray when highlighted).
That and accessibility.
Sad because I learned so much tkinter, and despite that, I'm fine with moving away from tkinter. I'm not sure who the problem is.
Qt looks nice but license fees are pretty expensive for small shops.
Could use the GPL version but I’m just afraid of becoming dependent on a tool that will keep the most interesting features only available for the commercial version.
If I follow correctly, it's building the whole UI from images from the Figma file, so isn't using any native OS styling. Thats fine for demos and some simple apps.
It would be interesting if it was possible to combine this with BeeWhare [0] for mobile UIs, mobile is much more forgiving with none native style. I wander if it could be modified to output BeeWhare/Toga code.
I have used chatgpt a bit for coding tasks, and it is alright. Kind of like getting a not that smart student to do something, and repeatedly prodding them to do it right.
https://www.hwaci.com/sw/mktclapp/xmta1.jpg
It had compactness, consistency, accessibility, multi language built in, composability, ability for the User to customize things like contrast and sizes, etc.
Personally I was excited that maybe this would be a project that would get back to those sane foundations.
Oh well, fuck that I guess
See https://tkdocs.com/tutorial/idle.html for a case-study involving IDLE (Search for "Another Example" to see the settings window). You should be able to tell from the windows and mac screenshots how old this article is.
Most of what you'll need will be under the LGPL version. You can use the commercial version by paying and not publishing your source or via the GPL license and publish your full source code and everything else GPL requires.
I cannot recommend it more, give it a try it's easy to learn (I studied the basics in a day and a working prototype quite fast).
Something I've been working on: converting Markdown text into a Kanban view (in QML).[1]
