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by JoshTriplett 3971 days ago
Qt and GTK+ are supposed to be those portable GUI toolkits. That people end up writing additional layers above them suggests that those toolkits haven't done their job as well as they should have. But to the best of my knowledge, both Qt and GTK+ have it as a design goal to feel native on each target platform, to the extent those target platforms have a concept of "feeling native".

Any good examples where GTK+ or Qt doesn't feel native on a given platform? And, any particular reason those can't be bug reports that get fixed? Is there any fundamental reason that stops those toolkits from looking and feeling native?
1 comments
kitsunesoba 3971 days ago
It's not so obvious on Windows, but a thing written with non-native tool kits stick out sorely on OS X simply because AppKit is so much more detailed, nuanced, and in some cases functional than the average Windowsesque UI toolkit. It's incredibly rare for cross platform apps to get this right because they more often than not take the "lets do everything ourselves" route and set "basic windowslike" as the goal. In other words, lowest common denominator.

Point in case: every Cocoa text field has emacs keybinds, spellcheck, dictionary/thesaurus/Wikipedia lookup, and more baked into them. The ubiquity of these features between applications on the platform is excellent and rather jarring when it's suddenly not there (as is often the case with cross platform software).

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JoshTriplett 3971 days ago
> Point in case: every Cocoa text field has emacs keybinds, spellcheck, dictionary/thesaurus/Wikipedia lookup, and more baked into them. The ubiquity of these features between applications on the platform is excellent and rather jarring when it's suddenly not there (as is often the case with cross platform software).

That's not fundamental to portability, though. There's no reason both GTK+ and Qt couldn't use those same text fields.

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