nana VS copperspice

If you want to start with a smaller GUI lib (instead of the bigger ones), you could use Nana (C++ Library), see also User Works using Nana - it uses modern C++11/14/17 (instead of older C++ like wxWidgets or the external macro processor tool MOC used by Qt).

https://github.com/cnjinhao/nana Boost Software License

well, nana seems to still be developed, but it's in another branch for now: https://github.com/cnjinhao/nana/tree/develop-1.8

I’ve seen people use https://github.com/cnjinhao/nana, but the other suggestions are probably better.

I would suggest https://github.com/cnjinhao/nana . There is also https://github.com/andlabs/libui, although that is C (not C++).

I especially appreciate its one string layout method nana::form::div(), see https://github.com/cnjinhao/nana/wiki/Div-Text

Tangentially, I just listened to an old cppcast about https://www.copperspice.com/, a QT fork with ambitions of being more c++-ey.

There was already a fork of Qt 4. It is tootling along fine: https://www.copperspice.com/

BTW, CopperSpice sounds pretty close to what you're mentioning: https://www.copperspice.com

If you already have a lot of use of Qt your might find CopperSpice to be a reasonable compromisehttps://www.copperspice.com/

exactly I'm quite happy to have my code written for me. If you don't like the moc you can use CopperSpice https://www.copperspice.com/

CopperspiceCopperspice

CopperSpice might be worth looking at too. Coming from Qt you're probably going to like it better than wxWidgets.

So I strongly dislike Qt. It's got a predatory vision for open source enforcement where they mislead their customers with spoopy language and make it harder and harder to download. In addition, they continue to insist on an architecture that's not even actually C++ (it's got a different grammar) despite it being completely possible to architect a better version of their designs in standard C++.

See copperspice project. Originally forked to work around short coming of Meta-Object Compilation.