Shoes makes building little graphical programs for Mac, Windows, Linux simple

1. Shoes

   1 2 1,602 3.1 Ruby

   Shoes 4 : the next version of Shoes

   

   As someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby").

   https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/

   http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4

   No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way.

   Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459

2. Judoscale

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   Save 47% on cloud hosting with autoscaling that just works. Judoscale integrates with Rails, Sidekiq, Solid Queue, and more to make autoscaling easy and reliable. Save big, and say goodbye to request timeouts and backed-up job queues.

   

3. JRuby

   2 24 3,814 9.9 Ruby

   JRuby, an implementation of Ruby on the JVM

   

   As someone who has looked at Shoes several times but never dove in, it's confusing how Shoes 4 has been the "preview version" of Shoes for, like, a decade or more. It made me actively avoid getting invested in Shoes 3 (the release promoted on the linked website) because Shoes 4 requires JRuby and I am happy with CRuby (the Ruby interpreter most people think of when they hear "Ruby").

   https://github.com/shoes/shoes4/

   http://www.rubydoc.info/github/shoes/shoes4

   No disrespect to the developers but to me it feels like taking over a GUI toolkit created "to teach programming to everyone" (to quote the Shoes 4 readme) and making it depend upon a super-complicated enterprise-focused Ruby was sort of Missing The Point™ in a huge way.

   Heck I couldn't even switch to JRuby if I wanted to because I <3 Ractors and JRuby still lacks CRuby 3.0 feature parity: https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/7459

4. legacy-glitched-factory

   3 1 - -

   But if you want to access the documentation online I made a small website for that [3]. The official documentation is only available in the executable which isn’t great to browse.

   - [1] https://gitlab.com/png-glitch/legacy-glitched-factory

5. shoes3

   4 1 181 - C

   a tiny graphical app kit for ruby

   

6. glimmer-dsl-libui

   5 21 558 7.3 Ruby

   Glimmer DSL for LibUI - Prerequisite-Free Ruby Desktop Development Cross-Platform Native GUI Library - The Quickest Way From Zero To GUI - If You Liked Shoes, You'll Love Glimmer! - No need to pre-install any prerequisites. Just install the gem and have platform-independent GUI that just works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

   

   glimmer-dsl-libui is a more actively maintained alternative

   https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-libui

7. fyne

   6 160 26,236 9.6 Go

   Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design

   

8. Platypus

   7 7 2,981 5.8 Objective-C

   Create native Mac applications from command line scripts.

   

   Something for which I wish there was a windows variant...

   Embedding a script into a small tray icon/menubar app can be extremely powerfull even with its low complexity.

   [1]: https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus

9. CodeRabbit

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10. tauri

    8 507 91,648 9.8 Rust

    Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop and mobile applications with a web frontend.

    

11. why-archive

    9 1 39 - C

    This is an archive of things that made _why known to many on the web.

    

    > But maybe I missing the point?

    maybe. coding can be playful and computers are for everyone.

    https://github.com/whymirror/why-archive/blob/master/shoes/n...

12. PySimpleGUI

    10 51 13,589 8.4 Python

    Python GUIs for Humans! PySimpleGUI is the top-rated Python application development environment. Launched in 2018 and actively developed, maintained, and supported in 2024. Transforms tkinter, Qt, WxPython, and Remi into a simple, intuitive, and fun experience for both hobbyists and expert users.

    

    Just a heads up: PySimpleGUI 5 isn't open source any more [0], and the official GitHub repo was replaced with a stub [1]. From the blog post, it sounds like the people behind it will probably remove the FOSS version from PyPI soon.

    It's possible the community will fork it with a version of PySimpleGUI 4 that's still kicking around, but I haven't seen one yet.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369353

    [1] https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI

13. scarpe

    11 1 173 7.7 Ruby

    Scarpe - shoes but running on webview (by scarpe-team)

    

    If you're specifically looking for something like Shoes, here are two similar projects in Ruby:

    - Scarpe is a WIP revival of Shoes. https://github.com/scarpe-team/scarpe

14. Glimmer

    12 25 764 6.6 Ruby

    DSL Framework consisting of a DSL Engine and a Data-Binding Library used in Glimmer DSL for SWT (JRuby Desktop Development GUI Framework), Glimmer DSL for Opal (Pure Ruby Web GUI), Glimmer DSL for LibUI (Prerequisite-Free Ruby Desktop Development GUI Library), Glimmer DSL for Tk (Ruby Tk Desktop Development GUI Library), Glimmer DSL for GTK (Ruby-GNOME Desktop Development GUI Library), Glimmer DSL for XML (& HTML), and Glimmer DSL for CSS

    

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