HumbleUI VS FlatLaf

So you can see, there are really a lot of choices but none of them dominates, which means they all have flaws. You can read a good article from Niki Tonsky where Clojure UI problems are discussed. Also to address the problems Niki Tonsky started the development of a new UI for Clojure, called Humble UI. So now we have one more option :)

If you don't mind being stuck on Windows you could use Visual C# or Visual Basic, they have edit-and-continue too. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/edit... I've worked with the SuperTux C# level editor in the past. C# was actually pretty nice for GUI stuff.

There doesn't seem to be a good GUI framework for Clojure. There was Seesaw but it hasn't been updated since 2019. There is a guy developing a new framework https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/ but it's WIP. I guess you could sidestep this by making it a webapp and using figwheel.

UI toolkits: https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI and https://github.com/phronmophobic/membrane

Nikita Prokopov is developing Humble UI which is worth keeping a close eye on. (Yes, it's Clojure, but Java interop is bound to emerge if it builds up a critical mass and catches on.)

https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/

I've made a few desktop apps in https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx (e.g., https://www.chronos-desk.com/), and cljfx (JavaFX + Clojure) is amazing and makes for rapid development, not to mention fun. I'm keeping an eye on https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI, which promises to be a step up.

JVM UI isn't so bad. I've written some pretty modern looking UI with it. The sophisticated controls are all there.

Modern JavaFX theme: https://github.com/mkpaz/atlantafx

Modern Swing theme: https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And these days Compose Multiplatform: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/

I tend to use Kotlin rather than Java but of course Java is perfectly fine too. You can also use Clojure.

If you use any of those frameworks you can distribute to Win/Mac/Linux in one command with Conveyor. It's free for open source apps and can do self-signing for Windows if you don't want to pay for the certificates or the Store (but the Store is super cheap these days, $19 one off payment for an individual). Also supports Electron and Flutter if you want to use those.

From those frameworks you can then access whatever parts of the Windows API you want. Flutter even has WinRT bindings these days! So it's not quite so bad.

FlatLaf, a modern open-source cross-platform Look and Feel for Java Swing desktop applications, brings exciting new features in versions 3.0 and 3.1 🎉 😀

Here’s the link to the “extras” subproject, and there you’ll find a section on the “UI Inspector” tool.

Swing with FlatLaf - https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

Take a look at FlatLAF:

https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

They have done a great job bringing a modern appearance to the Swing components.

Creating your own Look and Feel is a huge task (just look at the size of e.g. the FlatLaf code.

I too find it a bit frustrating at HiDPI. Best I've come up with is to use https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf

And as far as Swing's aesthetics, I only agree with the sentiment that 'it's ugly' if a custom LAF isn't used, like one from flatlaf.