orbtk VS keyboard-configurator

i was gonna bring up https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk only to discover it's no longer under active development.

OrbTk is sunsetting in favor of Iced, slint, and future renderer-agnostic toolkits: https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk

Orbtk

The GitLab repo was deleted. You will need to update the submodule path to https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk.

That said, I'm not totally convinced about SixtyFPS today. There are some other interesting options that are suitable GUI toolkits for Rust. Such as OrbTk and Iced. Each toolkit is approaching the GUI space in a different way, so it'll be interesting to see where we end up in a few more years. QML-esque SixtyFPS, ECS-based OrbTk, Elm-based Iced, and a few others out there.

What's written in this article isn't the development of a GTK fork, but some reasoning for exploring alternatives to GTK. There aren't very many suitable candidates in this space, but Rust GUI toolkits like Iced have potential. Personally, I would add that OrbTk is also a suitable candidate.

I use orbtk, it is pretty easy to use, has an active dev team, works on windows mac and linux, and cross compiling from linux to windows is also easy with it. It is still pretty beta, but depending on the project you need it could work. (https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk)

Orbtk is an option. The default is backend is orbraq, which uses OrbClient. OrbClient will use SDL on Linux, and on Redox it should be a "pure" rust experience.

OrbTK recompiling stuff has been fixed in the development branch as far as I can tell: https://github.com/redox-os/orbtk/pull/409

OrbTK

Many or most of their keyboards are configurable these days. See https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator

Reported at https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator/issues/195 - I get a failure from dfu-programmer trying to update using the alternate update method with the keyboard-configurator app (because fwupdmgr won't update it because of the firmware bug that the new firmware addresses).

I found the ticket regarding Fn lock https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator/issues/159

keyboard-configurator

Good. I bought Darter Pro recently and had to - business as usual under Linux - compile this and tweak that. Via things like their keyboard configurator[1] I was exposed me to Rust's GTK bindings. It wasn't pretty: the mismatch between the obviously object-oriented GTK and Rust which doesn't do (and doesn't want to) OOP was glaring. I understand the appeal of Rust very well, and I'm happy they write their drivers and (parts of) firmware in it, but it's about as fit for OOP-based GUI as Go and Erlang. Which is to say - not very much.

[1] https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator

That's exactly what it's meant for, but the frontend of the configurator app doesn't seem to list those characters. You may consider opening an issue and relating to this one: https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator/issues/105

Probably a good issue to open here: https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator