lintplus VS druid

Former contributor and user of Lite XL here.

It's an awesome little editor. I quit using it though because it seemed like the future direction of the project wasn't very clear, and from a practical standpoint VS Code simply has a better developer experience, but I had great fun hacking around it nevertheless.

One of my favorite things about rxi/lite and Lite XL is just how easy it is to write plugins. Simply create a new .lua file in the plugins directory and monkey-patch whatever you need. And while it might seem like monkey-patching isn't the most clean solution, that's not exactly true — the source code of the editor doesn't need to be cluttered with explicit hooks, and plugins interoperate with each other very well, because one plugin doesn't know about the others' existence. From its standpoint it just modifies the vanilla editor.

This extensibility allowed me to write some really cool stuff, the one plugin I'm especially proud of is lint+ [1], which leverages the immediate mode nature of the UI to draw pretty lint messages atop the text editor (and it even renders Rust's friendly compiler errors with little rails on the left! see issue #3 [2]).

Can recommend.

  [1]: https://github.com/liquidev/lintplus

I desperately want this. I find text editors w/ basic linting to be too limited but full IDE's like Idea or even VSCode too heavy for some devices. Something in between :(. I've given up laptop development and am forced to work with my desktop until I can afford a better laptop because Idea/VSCode runs so slowly.

FWIW, I use lite (https://github.com/rxi/lite) if I need a very lightweight text editor that has rust linting (https://github.com/liquidev/lintplus) and Idea if I'm at my desktop.

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.