How do you create a cross-platform GUI without using Electron?

1

fman build system

I've had decent experiences with Python and Qt5. Windows was historically the painful part, but FBS¹ makes that a lot less painful nowadays. Tk also works reasonably well if you don't need the features and native integration that Qt offers (and I'm pretty sure FBS can handle Tkinter apps just fine). The .NET ecosystem is another solid choice for cross-platform desktop app development (and nowadays even mobile, too). Avalonia² in particular looks promising, and is probably what I'd try using first should I ever be tasked with developing a desktop app again. ---- ¹: https://build-system.fman.io/ ²: https://avaloniaui.net/.

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 11 social mentions

2

Sciter

Sciter [1] is kind of a really lightweight electron. It's about 8Mb, cross platform, and you can either run it standalone (like electron) or use it as a library from Rust/D/Python/C#/whatever. You pay for that with a lack of compatibility with the existing Javascript ecosystem. Any moderately complex JavaScript library that interacts with the dom will probably use something that Sciter doesn't implement, so you end up reimplementing stuff like graph libraries. On the other hand there are a couple of very useful additional APIs that regular browsers don't have (like SQLite). 1: https://sciter.com/.

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 67 social mentions

3

JUCE

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Game Engine 55 social mentions

4

Xamarin

There’s also Xamarin. Uses C# and dotnet. You can choose between native widgets and platform-agnostic. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/xamarin.

#Developer Tools #App Development #IDE 26 social mentions

5

Godot Engine

#Game Development #Game Engine #3D Game Engine 446 social mentions

6

Uno Platform

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 62 social mentions

7

Avalonia

I've had decent experiences with Python and Qt5. Windows was historically the painful part, but FBS¹ makes that a lot less painful nowadays. Tk also works reasonably well if you don't need the features and native integration that Qt offers (and I'm pretty sure FBS can handle Tkinter apps just fine). The .NET ecosystem is another solid choice for cross-platform desktop app development (and nowadays even mobile, too). Avalonia² in particular looks promising, and is probably what I'd try using first should I ever be tasked with developing a desktop app again. ---- ¹: https://build-system.fman.io/ ²: https://avaloniaui.net/.

#Development Tools #Rapid Application Development #Cross-Platform Development 117 social mentions

8

Kanmail

There's pywebview (https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview/) which is a Python lib that uses whatever native webview implementation exists. Obviously means some compatibility work between each OS, but gives out very small apps what work very well on the whole. I'm using it on my cross platform email client (https://kanmail.io).

#Email Clients #Kanban #Productivity 4 social mentions