boon VS druid

I've never yet used kakoune itself, but I've just started using the Meow modal editing package for Emacs, which I'm told resembles kakoune to some similar extent as boon resembles vi.

Shouldn't make much difference, because most of Emacs's default keybinds are either mnemonic or arbitrary (not relative, like Vi's hjkl). There are some unique control interfaces for Emacs which support (and even recommend) alt layouts out of the box. Specifically Meow, Fingers and Boon.

There's also Boon which I like quite a lot but I opted against using mostly because of all the places I would need to type where I wouldn't have access to Boon unless I ported it (a plan I assure you but one lumped behind 1,000 other projects TODO).

https://github.com/jyp/boon

To build on what others are saying about Emacs, if you start exploring the package ecosystem, you're going to see quite a lot of really interesting packages that are related to improving/experimenting with the UX of editing text. While I'm not endorsing anyone in particular, I think what this list does show is just how easy it is to do pretty much whatever you want in Emacs;

https://karthinks.com/software/avy-can-do-anything/

https://github.com/jyp/boon

https://github.com/clemera/objed

https://github.com/jmorag/kakoune.el

https://github.com/meow-edit/meow/

https://github.com/xahlee/xah-fly-keys

https://github.com/Kungsgeten/ryo-modal

https://github.com/emacsorphanage/god-mode

Emacs 29 also now has treesitter and LSP mode integration built-in, a compilation mode, a comint mode for REPLs, excellent file browsing packages (I use dired/dirvish), and a few other killer features.

Now, if what you truly dislike are "quirky editors", prepare yourself for a world of hurt because vanilla Emacs departs quite a bit from "modern" text editors. I struggled with this for a while, but eventually by buying into the paradigm, I now feel that when emacs try emulating "modern" IDE features like autocompletion, LSP, and DAP UI, I feel like it's a regression, not a progression. The point here is that you might have an "idea" of what good initial UX and lack of quirks would look like, but Emacs might change the way you think.

Vim never, ever appealed to me. The keys are not exactly ergonomic, like the WordStar diamond, or intuitive, like the Emacs keys. But I can understand how modal editing - like in WordStar - can improve the writing experience tremendously. So, for my custom Emacs configuration for creative writing, I am using Boon, which allows me to use the left hand home row to navigate characters/words/sentences/lines, and the right hand home row to delete/insert/etc. Pressing v switches to Insert Mode, and C-; switches back to Command Mode. Highly addictively efficient!

I've used both vim and evil in the past, but lately I've been playing with boon and I'm quite enjoying it. It plays nicely with emacs and has some good ideas, like pressing the yank key twice in a row will fix spaces:

I am using Boon, and it has transformed my Emacs experience!

I use https://github.com/jyp/boon which has changed my life.

I am not using Evil in 2022 because I am using Boon :)

For GUI applications, the story is mixed. There are several GUI frameworks in active development, but nothing as polished and battle-tested as Electron for TypeScript. There are bindings to GTK, but they're cumbersome to work with, and I wouldn't recommend it to a Rust newbie. There's also Tauri, which is a bit like Electron and lets you write the GUI in HTML/CSS/JS and the business logic in Rust.

Concerning GUI frameworks, the most common ones are druid, egui and iced. All three of them run native and on the Web.

Going to give a shoutout to druid. I've recently tried it with the Lapce editor and it's just so smooth, fast and works so well for a pre-alpha app.

As iced and egui were difficult for me, i started with druid.

There is Iced which is used by system76 in Pop!_OS, Druid [DISCONTINUED], GTK-rs, Relm, Azul and Tauri. Personally I would use Tauri for its speed using the OS's native web render, documentation of use with things such as Sveltekit and the ability to make UI's using JS, CSS and HTML. Tauri similarly to Electron whilst being far faster. But its up to personal preference really. There aren't any solid "go to" options at the moment.

Druid should be good for most cases, it has a lot of built-in widget for the UI, you can even make a custom widget with a canvas-alike painting API.

Druid, which is a Rust-native UI toolkit for building desktop applications targeting Windows/macOS/Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD, has a new version out - v0.8.

There's a memoize View node in the previous iteration of the Xilem prototype, but it hasn't made it in to the current branch yet. That sounds like what you're asking, but it's possible I'm missing something.

You can use GTK from Rust. But the Rust native ones aren't really there yet. [Iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced) which has been picked up by System76 and [Druid](https://github.com/linebender/druid) (and it's next gen version [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem)) are the ones to watch, along with Dioxus which is the main post here.

I'd expect there to be something useable by the end of 2023.