vgtk VS inspiral-web

A pretty fun Rust GUI experienc is vgtk[0], which is doing a bunch of macro magic to give a "we're coding in React" vibe to GTK+. I don't really have a specific thing I want to code in a native GUI at the moment but if I did I think this would be the most tempting for me.

[0]: https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/

a stateful GUI markup language is react. it is not yet the case that react-like code works for desktop, though there are cool examples like vgtk https://github.com/bodil/vgtk

from what i gather from https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/issues/78, you're better off using realm

I'm always curious to see these projects, because I've been experimenting with a React renderer for the GJS bindings for a while. It's frustrating because GTK "feels like" it's so close to being able to support a vdom/declarative paradigm, but the devil is in the details.

The simple use-cases like "Window > Box > Label" are easy to get going. The more complex widgets like Stack/Grid/TreeView ... aren't.

This project seems to have the same issue: https://github.com/bodil/vgtk/issues/40

This is made more difficult now GTK4 has removed the Container base class, so there's no longer a unified interface for adding children (although it had caveats in the first place).

I totally get the GTK view that (presumably) specific widgets are more intuitive with specific add/remove APIs (like the grid - one doesn't really "appendChild" to a grid).

It just feels like: if there was a consistent container API comparable to the web's appendChild approach, a vdom/declarative approach would require only a very light wrapper. Without it, I keep coming back to the idea of implementing wrapper widgets that expose that consistent API instead. And that's just not something I want to maintain - effectively duplicating each GTK widget for the purpose of making it fit into a tree model.

It's also a problem of trying to wrap richer functionality (pack_start and pack_end) into a simpler set (append only) of course.

So I don't know exactly what my point is :) Perhaps cautioning the reader that the simplicity of the approach comes with a catch.

A declarative desktop UI framework for Rust built on GTK and GTK-rs\ (23 comments)

Build your own To-do List Application in Rust: https://bodil.lol/vgtk/

I learned of this one in year 2016: https://nathanfriend.io/inspiral-web/

Try this

I liked it quite a bit, found the inspirograph there

You could use this online tool : https://nathanfriend.io/inspiral-web/ , it could be perfect if it let you export to SVG (I’m using a mobile) .

you can do an online version of this at https://nathanfriend.io/inspiral-web/

Online Spirograph Tool\ (10 comments)