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Ask HN: What's your preferred toolset for developing desktop GUI applications?

5 pointsby xzionabout 9 years ago
I&#x27;m an C++ embedded firmware developer day to day, also competent with Python&#x2F;Javascript. I&#x27;ve been working on a nodejs website for the past year or so, so I&#x27;ve got a feel for designing basic web gui&#x27;s with HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS.<p>For my next project I was thinking about trying to build a touch friendly code editor&#x2F;browser. I&#x27;ve never built a desktop GUI application before, so I thought it might interesting to see what most people in the community prefer to use. I&#x27;m working on Windows, but cross platform capability would be ideal.<p>From my preliminary investigation, QT seems to be the standard choice. I&#x27;m not sure how suitable it is for a touch friendly application. Electron also seems like a possibility, though I&#x27;ve read it can be slow and resource hungry.<p>What do&#x2F;would you use?

3 comments

kek918about 9 years ago
I&#x27;ve made a couple GUI applications at work. They&#x27;re quite simple, it&#x27;s just a pretty wrapper to my otherwise boring terminal scripts because they need extra parameters.<p>For this I&#x27;ve used Qt framework for C++ and it is absolutely fantastic. I love the framework, QtEditor IDE, syntax, everything about it. I dropped my other IDEs (CodeBlocks and Visual Studio) and continued to use their IDE when writing pure C&#x2F;C++ as well.<p>I&#x27;ve never touched the Qt framework before, but after watching a series on Youtube[1] and coding along I got the hang of it. It&#x27;s very intuitive, easy to learn, yet extremely powerful.<p>[1]: &quot;C++ Qt Programming&quot; by VoidRealms - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL2D1942A4688E9D63" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL2D1942A4688E9D63</a>
twctek43aabout 9 years ago
I haven&#x27;t tried anything outside of Qt, but I thought I&#x27;d mention that it is touch-screen friendly. You can get a CSS&#x2F;JS-like way of creating and describing GUIs using QML, and Qt supports multi touch events.
herbstabout 9 years ago
I dont do GUIs, but if i would, i would use <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;electron.atom.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;electron.atom.io&#x2F;</a>