pywebview VS libui

In case anyone else is unfamiliar:

> pywebview uses native GUI for creating a web component window: WinForms on Windows, Cocoa on macOS, QT or GTK on Linux and Kivy for Android.

https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview

- [swallow-pywebview](https://github.com/rangwea/swallow-pywebview)： Base on [pywebview](https://pywebview.flowrl.com/) using Python，the frontend base on [alpinejs](https://alpinejs.dev/) and [tailwindcss](https://tailwindcss.com/)。

Somehow related, I've been using pywebview for some internal tools: https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview

Probably not as full-featured as Electronjs, but since we have a bunch of python scripts to convert to desktop apps, it's very useful.

I've been on a blitz experimenting with pywebview (electron but for Python) and a ReactJS UI.

The native mode uses pywebview under the hood which has libs for running on several platforms. Pyinstaller will pull these dependencies in. If you want more info on which platforms are supported by pywebview, check this directory: https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview/tree/master/webview/lib

For reference to anyone not familiar - https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview

import webview window = webview.create_window('Woah dude!', 'https://pywebview.flowrl.com') webview.start()

pywebview (https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview) is an excellent suggestion and is already being used in NiceGUI to create a native desktop window with "native=True" option (see http://127.0.0.1:8080/documentation#ui_run).

Thanks for sharing. The issue is tracked at https://github.com/zauberzeug/nicegui/issues/576. But it looks like something which originates from the pywebview lib which is used to provide the native mode.

You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.

We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.

Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.

Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.

Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.

Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.

So enjoy Electron I guess.

There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.

Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.

What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.

If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.

libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.

libui

https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):

Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?