9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • QMetaObject crate for Rust

    Integrate Qml and Rust by building the QMetaObject at compile time.

  • You can use Rust with QML[1].

    QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

    I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

    [1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

    [2] https://www.get-plume.com/

    [3] https://www.appflowy.io/

    [4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

  • AppFlowy

    AppFlowy is an open-source alternative to Notion. You are in charge of your data and customizations. Built with Flutter and Rust.

  • You can use Rust with QML[1].

    QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

    I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

    [1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

    [2] https://www.get-plume.com/

    [3] https://www.appflowy.io/

    [4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

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  • qwindowkit

    Cross-platform frameless window framework for Qt. Support Windows, macOS, Linux.

  • You can use Rust with QML[1].

    QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory leaks that caused my computer to hang. It's better to know you have a bug than for it to be hidden from you.

    I agree with parent commenter, saying these cross-platform frameworks will end up supporting the least common denominator set of features. But I found with external open source libraries, the community is catching up very fast. For example, you want the awesome translucency macOS apps have for your Qt app? Here you go[4]. Many such cases. It's also pretty straightforward to add your own custom OS-dependent code, especially so, if someone already open sourced his approach. I recently wanted to move the traffic light buttons on macOS for my app, but couldn't figure the Objective-C code for that. I ended up looking at either Tauri or Electron source code and found my answer.

    [1] https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs

    [2] https://www.get-plume.com/

    [3] https://www.appflowy.io/

    [4] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

  • slint

    Slint is a declarative GUI toolkit to build native user interfaces for Rust, C++, or JavaScript apps.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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