gtk-rs VS nodegui

gtk-rs

GTK: I have little - no experience with GTK, and from what i have read it is cross-platform similar to wxWidgets, however is an emulated UI system similar to Qt. As i have no experience with it i am not sure how well supported this library is as far as it's Rust - bindings are concerned gtk-rs

In a gtk-rs application, I'm running a xdotool command to get the id of the application's window. I'm running the command in a connect_show closure (after the window has been shown):

To build the UI, I used gtk-rs. My experience with this library was quite pleasant; it was easy to use and there were a lot of examples. However, it isn't as widely used as, say, React, so it was difficult to find answer on Stack Overflow (I come from a JavaScript/Typescript background).

I'm using x11rb to interact with a window created with gtk-rs. window_id is the ID of the window created with gtk-rs. window_id_2 is the ID of the window created with x11rb (for testing purposes).

I haven't used it yet, but gtk-rs looks pretty good too. I've used GTK in general, just not the Rust bindings so far. The tutorials seem nice and GTK is a good UI toolkit overall.

I'm using gtk-rs. I want to trigger some code after the window has been shown (has displayed on the screen):

I'm using gtk-rs to add ListBoxRow items to a ListBox. The items are successfully added if I do it outside of input.connect_changed, a closure. But nothing is added if I do it from inside input.connect_changed:

For GTK, there's https://gtk-rs.org/

Out there there are already some open source projects trying to do this, but most of them are abandoned or in a very alpha stage. The most promising project so far seems to me git-kt. This project is trying to do something similar to what gtk-rs does for Rust, which is using GObject Introspection (GIR) files to generate Kotlin native bindings automatically.

This looks like it hasn't been maintained in years but there's a modern equivalent in NodeGUI [1] which also has React/Svelte/Vue implementations. Unfortunately it requires a custom build of Node that merges the libuv and Qt6 event loops so YMMV.

It actually inspired me to write my own implementation with Svelte on top of QuickJS and Qt Widgets but the task of wrapping the entire Qt6 API in Rust proved to be intractable once I found out that most methods weren't marked Q_INVOKABLE and thus couldn't be called via reflection (requiring manual wrapping). Providing a `Document.createElement` API that created Qt Widgets with working attributes and event handling worked surprisingly well though!

[1] https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui

Hi, so this NodeGui library for building apps with native components is something I really want to get into, but, it does not work for me.. so I am starting this thread to check with yous (I depleted google results) if any one of you have tips or workarounds I can use. I wish to build a desktop app, but I really do not want to bundle a web browser for that purpose and NodeGui seems perfect.

Use NodeGui (or some equivalent tool) for this. Source: https://docs.nodegui.org/ This is needed because this entire project will run natively, by that I mean it will run with no browser, no local host and it no internet connection.

NodeGUI

Let's continue exploring Electron alternatives. This time, NodeGui. NodeGui uses Qt5 instead of Chromium, so we'll be leaving the familiar web development behind, but it tries to not be too far from it, as web development is what everyone knows.

(Disclaimer: My knowledge of Rust very limited, but I have quite a bit of experience with getting Qt/KDE classes to work with other languages.)

You are absolutely right. The effort to be acceptable bindings for Qt would be a tiny fraction of the cost compared to building a whole new Rust native GUI library.

Qt is huge set of libraries with an equally huge API. But there are a lot of shortcuts and smart ways of approaching the problem to get what you want out of Qt for minimum effort.

Bindings like PyQt and even PySide go for the nuclear option of generating bindings for the whole Qt API and trying to match the C++ API in style too. This is an absolutely massive huge task. Also, getting people to contribute to an open source bindings project is hard. Getting people to contribute to a bindings generator is even harder.

NodeGui https://github.com/nodegui/nodegui, Qt bindings for Nodejs, on the other hand takes a very different approach which in one way is low-tech but I think is actually very smart. I'll summerise the differences:

* It focuses on Qt Widgets first. This greatly reduces the amount of work to the parts that people actually need. (BTW, if you just want QML and Rust back-end then Jos van den Oever's work at https://invent.kde.org/sdk/rust-qt-binding-generator has probably got you covered already.)

There is actually a new GUI framework based out of Qt (a C++ GUI framework) that I have found recently : https://docs.nodegui.org/