[TeMPOraL]

"Native" in context of UI toolkits is "using system-provided UI controls through system APIs". The opposite of that is drawing your own controls, which then usually don't integrate well with the OS and don't support the interoperability and accessibility features that are expected of UI controls on that OS.

[bla3]

That's what native used to be, but nowadays it's "not electron". Qt or wxWidget apps are considered native as well.

[pcr910303]

> That's what native used to be, but nowadays it's "not electron".

This makes me sad. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y.

(It also allows OS/GTK/Qt devs to enhance UX without application modification.)

For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have universal readline-esque keybindings (and is configurable globally) which, as an Emacs user, very, very useful.

Most Mac apps use Cocoa as the GUI toolkit, so basically all kinds of apps can benefit these keybindings.

Another example of this directly benefiting users is the addition of tabs in macOS Sierra(I’m not sure about the exact versions :-().

macOS Sierra added tabs to Cocoa apps, and applications could get the feature without additional modification. (I’m not sure if it’s absolutely none or if recompiling was needed, but I think it’s the former.)

I could use tabs in any application, with the same look-and-feel, in all apps!

And, don’t forget accessibility here!

Stories like these are mostly only macOS; since Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements, while Linux’s GUI toolkits are super-fragmented. (GTK vs Qt is one thing, and there are lots of other options!)

We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (and that is why I’m hoping cross-platform native UI libraries like libui succeed), not using some Flutter-esque library that draws everything from scratch.

(BTW, AFAIK wxWidget tries to get this right and tries to draw things using the native toolkit.)

[saagarjha]

> macOS Sierra added tabs to Cocoa apps, and applications could get the feature without additional modification. (I’m not sure if it’s absolutely none or if recompiling was needed, but I think it’s the former.)

Tab support was added without linking against the new SDK: apps would get it "for free" when running on macOS Sierra.

[pcr910303]

> Tab support was added without linking against the new SDK: apps would get it "for free" when running on macOS Sierra.

Yeah, right. I remember being very happy as some of my not-worried-about-mac applications (it's a word processor that uses a special format only used in our country) had tabbing enabled. :-)

[Crinus]

So Java is native now?

I think a simpler and easier approach is to simply wait until the inevitable next desktop disaster so that we can call Electron native.

[eivarv]

Qt is decidedly not native, but can attempt a "native look-and-feel".

wxWidgets actually wraps native GUI widgets though...