aqtinstall VS CSharpForMarkup

I've used aqt[1] before but it doesn't look like it's seeing 5.15.11 yet, just 5.15.2.

[1]: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Don't use the Qt installer. It sucks. It's only reason is to annoy people and collect your data. Use aqt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best native GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??).

Unlike you, I like the direction where Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick.

I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.

Install the qt binaries from the command line https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall will help you with that.

you can install it from vcpkg or conan (or https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall if you really want the official Qt binaries) and it'll be much less

Is there any particular reason why you want to build Qt yourself? This is usually quite painful and requires a lot of extra stuff (see https://wiki.qt.io/Building\_Qt\_6\_from\_Git) . If you just want to avoid the (horrible) official installer and a Qt account, you can use aqtinstaller to fetch everything you need: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

Just recently, I had to recompile a (singleplayer) save game editor. So basically a GUI that does some clever hex editing.

It was written in C++ using Qt.

Have you ever tried compiling a Qt program on Windows? It involves signing up for an official Qt developer account to even install qmake.

To the point I had to use an unofficial Qt installer CLI app (aqtinstall) [0] to even install the toolchain to build this little shitty app... which still relied on having several Qt .dll files in the same directory as the .exe to work.

Have you clicked on [0] yet? Well, then guess what programming language aqtinstall uses.

[0] https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.

Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)

Uno Platform can be both XAML or C# Markup if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it.

And if you use https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup with it, you can have an all-around C# approach for both front end and back end.

Maybe some c# markup libraries like this one. But I haven't use that so you'd need to check yourself

You can CSharpForMarkup with WPF, WinUI 3, Uno Platform. with AvaloniaUI and Maui coming and possibly Blazor.

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

To manage mental mapping of what is being drawn, I keep methods that create widget trees short. My rule of thumb is that whole method has to comfortably fit the screen at once. For each section of the main tree I create a static function that returns a branch of the tree. These functions have descriptive names that help you visualize what element each function builds. If a tree inside a function is long, it is broken down in the same way.

There are some fluent extensions (for Xamarin.Forms and probably future MAUI) that help you build UI in declarative fashion with C#. Same extensions could be created for other frameworks.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/c-sharp-markup-for-xa...

https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup

For reusable custom widgets that can't be done with a static function, I create new classes with their own widget trees. Try to keep widgets composable and avoid inheritance if possible.

Hot reload is coming in .NET 6, so waiting for rebuild will soon be history.

I have no experience with QML so I can't really comment on that.

If I were to build a windows only desktop app with technology I was moderately familiar with, I'd probably got for WPF + https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup Working without XAML makes life so much simpler.