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WhyNotHugotoday at 7:31 AM1 replyview on HN

Maybe on macOS you have great APIs, libraries and toolkits for making high quality GUIs, but if you're wanting to write open source software or target open source platforms, your options are limited and poor.

On the Linux/BSD side, most toolkits are of not great quality, you'll inherit all sorts of subtle bugs and quirky behaviours. Most of the software that's of _great_ quality doesn't use the toolkit, but interfaces with the compositor directly. The effort for developing GUIs under such circumstances is dramatically higher than a TUI, and a TUI is usually "good enough".

I really would prefer GUIs for a lot of things. But when a TUI takes a few weeks to make, the equivalent GUI would take a few months to make.


Replies

discreteeventtoday at 7:59 AM

Use Qt or Flutter