Ask HN: What's your preferred toolset for developing desktop GUI applications?

[xzion]

I'm an C++ embedded firmware developer day to day, also competent with Python/Javascript. I've been working on a nodejs website for the past year or so, so I've got a feel for designing basic web gui's with HTML/CSS/JS.

For my next project I was thinking about trying to build a touch friendly code editor/browser. I've never built a desktop GUI application before, so I thought it might interesting to see what most people in the community prefer to use. I'm working on Windows, but cross platform capability would be ideal.

From my preliminary investigation, QT seems to be the standard choice. I'm not sure how suitable it is for a touch friendly application. Electron also seems like a possibility, though I've read it can be slow and resource hungry.

What do/would you use?

[kek918]

I've made a couple GUI applications at work. They're quite simple, it's just a pretty wrapper to my otherwise boring terminal scripts because they need extra parameters.

For this I've used Qt framework for C++ and it is absolutely fantastic. I love the framework, QtEditor IDE, syntax, everything about it. I dropped my other IDEs (CodeBlocks and Visual Studio) and continued to use their IDE when writing pure C/C++ as well.

I've never touched the Qt framework before, but after watching a series on Youtube[1] and coding along I got the hang of it. It's very intuitive, easy to learn, yet extremely powerful.

[1]: "C++ Qt Programming" by VoidRealms - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2D1942A4688E9D63

[twctek43a]

I haven't tried anything outside of Qt, but I thought I'd mention that it is touch-screen friendly. You can get a CSS/JS-like way of creating and describing GUIs using QML, and Qt supports multi touch events.

[herbst]

I dont do GUIs, but if i would, i would use http://electron.atom.io/