[dohdhdaa]

Unless a Rust OS is created with an official toolkit, Rust apps will always exist on a platform that already has a native toolkit. Any custom framework will always feel wrong and out of place.

I use macOS, so apps should be written with AppKit. For Linux they should either be GTK or Qt, depending on desktop. Recreating widgets from scratch with GPU rendering is doomed to feel wrong to users.

[virtualritz]

> Recreating widgets from scratch with GPU rendering is doomed to feel wrong to users.

So following your argument, pretty much all apps I use on macOS are 'wrong' as far as GUI goes.

Off the top of my head from what I use most of the time: Maya, Houdini, Blender, Fusion360, Resolve, Darktable, Slack, Discord, VSCode. Not a single one of them uses native Cocoa widgets. And I couldn't care less.

Some of these are top of the line apps for 2D/3D content creation on that platform.

If the vendors of these apps can afford to not care about UI nativeness, why should any single one or small group of developers working their asses off on GUI crates for Rust? Mostly unpaid no less.

[rollcat]

> Not a single one of them uses native Cocoa widgets. And I couldn't care less.

Meanwhile I do care. My main reason being: macOS offers fantastic facilities for inspecting and scripting the native GUIs, think using the web inspector or GreaseMonkey, but across the entire OS - but of course it breaks e.g. on Electron apps. Other people will cite help menu integration, custom key shortcuts, accessibility (not only for the disabled), and - yes, resource usage. I remember being productive on a system with 256M of RAM, and before that - 4M, and before that - 64k. It's frustrating to see so much progress wasted, I shouldn't need to close ALL of the chat apps just to run StableDiffusion more smoothly.

[smoldesu]

Maybe Apple should write libraries for their GUI toolkits, then. It's awfully hard to beg people to write native apps for you when people need to learn a new language to do it.

[worik]

And when that new language is Swift. Coming from Rust Swift is hard to take.

[smoldesu]

That's more-or-less what I'm getting at. Apple can't replace Objective-C with Swift and expect people to not cock their head. They can either support a pre-existing language (like Microsoft with Rust) or home-bake something suitable for low-level development. Telling developers to not use the stuff they want to use sorta leaves their hands tied.

[pjmlp]

Microsoft's Rust support is basically non-existing for GUI applications, Rust/WinRT is miles away from achiving C++/WinRT parity, even more so with C#.

In its current state is only useful for CLI or services, unless you feel like doing WinUI team's work for free.

[lelanthran]

> So following your argument, pretty much all apps I use on macOS are 'wrong' as far as GUI goes.

MacOS apps feel pretty wrong to me.

Some don't remember which screen they should be on, and always go to that screen at a predetermined size and geometry (tkdiff).

Others expand incorrectly to full-screen (macvim) when moved to a different screen.

VSCode doesn't behave like the native apps.

The list goes on, I'm short on time.

> And I couldn't care less.

You caring or not doesn't make the problem go away - native widgets always feel less wrong than non-native widgets.

[virtualritz]

My main counter argument would be that most of the tasks I do on macOS require/are better done full screen.

And if you are on macOS doing any kind of design work, this is your mode of working. People using Photoshop or any 2D/3D DCC etc. You use all the screen space real estate on any number of screens you have. But even if I write code I run VSCode in full screen. If I have a dual screen setup I usually have one screen with two code editors, mini map & folders + terminal on screen two. But that's it.

But even assuming you run apps side by side/stacked whatever so you could actually visually see how non-native/different they look. Is that the real issue on macOS today? Personally the main gripe I have is that -- and kindly pardon the tangent -- macOS native window management is shite. One of the first things people that come from a *nix desktop buy/install, when they switch to macOS, is a proper (possibly tiling) window manager.

But back to widgets/look: in DCC apps the main sort of dialog you interact with are attribute editors where you change properties of an object or node.

I like to refer to an issue on the egui crate which has some of the best out-of-the-box support for this kind of widget composition[1].

Apple Human Interface (AHI) guidelines do not have any handrails on how these attribute editors should look or be done. The best you can do is go with dialog AHI guidelines and these fall short for this sort of window. I can go into great detail here why but it's beside the point. If you read my comment on the egui issue I linked above (same handle I use on HN) you may get an idea where I am coming from.

Most Human Computer Interface (HCI) guidlines for various platforms are based on typical late 90's early 2k desktop apps.

They were never updated to reflect on newer paradigmns for UX that evolved in recent years. Blame the fragmentation of the desktop and Electron & co.

IMHO this is the first problem the OS vendors need to solve before we can blame developers of UI libs to not make them look 'native enough'.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/88

[zamadatix]

On that tangent what are the top alternative window managers people here use on macOS? The native window management does indeed drive me up the wall.

[homarp]

>newer paradigmns for UX that evolved in recent years.

can you provide some examples on desktop? Touch maybe, but that is not used on desktop, afaik.

[virtualritz]

I should probably have said patterns, not paradignms but this beside the point.

I mean stuff that is common enough to deserve a defintion and a best practice laid out in a human computer interface (HCI) guideline document for a platform/OS.

Off the top of my head:

Tab closing behaviour on Chrome/FF. Close a tab, other tabs shift but don't change size immediately so you the next tab's close button is directly under the mouse and can bel clicked to close another tab (and another, and ...).

Another one: the typical chat app with servers/groups/contacts on a list on the left and the chat on the right (and possibly threads on the far right).

There is no good standard for this, everyone cooks their own soup so stuff you learned for Slack doesn't apply in Discord etc. I.e. it's a pattern of some sort but there are no Windows/macOS/Qt/GTK interface guidelines covering this case and/or suggesting best practices. This includes e.g. platform standard keybindings to select stuff in such apps (at best Tab switching works).

Another one is use of (some) Markdown-inspired stuff in chat apps. I.e. `monospaced` ```monospaced multline``` or even ```<language for syntax highlighting> ...```.

In Slack ``` works but ```<lang> doesn not (but does in Discord, used to work in Slack in the past, I think).

I think there are many such patterns that are maybe not as groundbreaking than the invention of tabs (90's?), combo boxes/menus (also 90's? When there are too many choices for radio buttons) etc.

But beause they are used in some form (or another, unfortunately) by many apps now, the OS vendors should define a best practice for implementing their end-user facing functionality/behavior in their HCI guidelines.

Even if the platform itself doesn't provide a ready-made widget for each such case.

Hope that makes sense and explains what I meant.

[vvillena]

A good "tiling helper" is Rectangle Pro. The basic version does enough, but the paid one is a game changer.

[hollerith]

>Maya, Houdini, Blender, Fusion360, Resolve, Darktable, Slack, Discord, VSCode. Not a single one of them uses native Cocoa widgets.

Also Firefox and Chrome and their forks (e.g., Brave).

[bobajeff]

It seems to me Mac users care about using native UI toolkits more so than Linux or even Windows users. I would suppose that has to do with how polished and integrated that platform is.

As a Linux user I really don't care if you use GTK for the UI. I've long given up on customizing the look and feel of my system to the point that application integration matter.

[troad]

For many decades, there have existed commercial apps native to the Apple ecosystem, often from small/mid-sized studios, which would use native UI to signal their premium craftsmanship. I think that for many long-time Mac users, seamless/native UI is still a signal of quality in third-party software. However, this sentiment is moribund. That entire market is now dwarfed by the ecosystem of “cross-platform apps” (formerly Windows ports, now usually web apps) and Unixy OSS tools; all the while the Mac App Store now peddles lots of native-UI apps of deeply questionable quality.

[mistrial9]

long ago, the integrated feeling of Apple MacOS was a great selling point; decades later, daily use of the web, more phone than desktop, Windows low-bar junk and other factors change the equation.

If a smart user here today says that recent network-centric apps are OK with him visually, then maybe they are OK?

[twoodfin]

I think Apple made a strategic error when they failed to embrace DOM/browser engine-based toolkits like Electron on the Mac. If they had applied their leverage, of which they have plenty, the technical challenges of better native integration and support for the wide range of traditional Mac affordances would seem to have been quite manageable.

[rollcat]

There's some reason to your proposition. Directly integrating/"embracing" foreign toolkits/web engines is the last thing Apple would ever do, but exposing more of the underlying machinery to allow third parties to integrate better - yeah, sounds good.

On the topic of Rust GUIs on Mac, this was recently in the news:

https://github.com/emilk/egui/commit/e1f348e4b24c2fa83d25c6a...

[meindnoch]

This. It’s so lame when UI elements can’t hang outside the bounds of the window (i.e. menus, tooltips, dropdowns, popovers) because everything is rendered like a game…

[nicoburns]

There's no reason Rust toolkits can't use separate windows for elements like menus and tooltips, and I know this is planned for at least some of the toolkits discussed in the post.

[bsder]

The problem right now the separation of concerns for GUIs is a complete shitshow on ALL platforms.

Even such "simple" tasks as how to composite a window, a video in that window, and a floating menu over that window are not very well specified in any OS (try resizing that window and watch the fun). Or, for example, your floating menu--should the parent window resize itself and paint with transparent pixels in the extra area or should that menu be a separate "window"? And, what does being a "window" even mean?

Add into that the fact that we really should be making multithreaded GUI systems at this point and it's very clear that GUIs are stuck in a local minimum that's really hard to get out of because GUI systems require so many lines of code.

[meindnoch]

Window resizing works perfectly fine on macOS if you use the native AppKit framework. It’s only when you try to embed a whole different world (Qt, GTK, Flutter, Electron) in your window via an opaque OpenGL/Metal surface that things break/lag/distort on resizing the window, which again is another reason to stay away from these cross-platform GUI shims.

I don’t really see the reason for multithreaded UIs either. A single UI thread works perfectly fine if you move your business logic off to a separate thread. Most people are just too lazy to do that, and start developing their app with the business logic running synchronously on the UI thread; which works for a while, but eventually reaches a point where it starts blocking the UI event loop; then they try bandaging it by moving certain pieces to a background thread and they shoot themselves in the foot with thread-safety issues. The way to solve this is not by making the UI framework multi-threaded… Simply be disciplined with UI ↔ business logic separation from the get go and all these problems go away. Yes, I know it’s so tempting to call the database directly from the button click handler - but don’t do it.

[Strom]

What you are talking about has nothing to do with custom vs native controls. Instead it's a question of using a single or multiple windows.

There are Rust GUI toolkits like Druid with custom controls that have elements outside the bounds of the main window.

[bitexploder]

The only cross platform toolkit that pulls it off well is Java. IntelliJ feels good on every platform. Qt apps can also feel native if a little effort is put into it. Rust GUI frameworks are one of its weaker areas IMO.

[ptx]

The next time you use a Swing app, look for these examples of how it "pulls it off well":

* The first time any particular window is opened, Swing draws the contents but then changes its mind about the window size, recalculates the layout and then redraws the contents again slightly differently.

* When Swing creates a window, you can sometimes observe how creates it in the wrong spot and then moves it to where it was supposed to be created.

* Alt-tabbing quickly between two windows in a Swing application doesn't always work. It sometimes just glitches and leaves you in the window you started with. (Confirmed just now on Windows 10 with Java 17. The bug has been there for many, many years.)

* When opening a submenu of a menu, Swing does nothing to handle the problem of the menu closing again as you're moving towards it but accidentally mouse over an adjacent item. Platform GUI toolkits solve this either with a delay or by tracking the direction of the movement. IntelliJ implements its own menu bar to make this work.

* Try to find an example of a window that is resizable in only one direction or only up to a certain maximum size. As far as I can tell, this is not possible in Swing, and applications handle this limitation by designing all UIs to be resizable even when it doesn't make any sense.

[chrismorgan]

I have never had anything other than a terrible experience with a Java app, under Windows, Linux (in GNOME 2 and Unity most of a decade ago, i3, or Sway). They always disregard platform conventions in both look and feel to a painful extent. But I will declare that I haven’t ever used IntelliJ, and I have no idea what it uses for its UI. But out of the box, Qt seems vastly better at matching platform look and feel, and generally gives you decent control over matching or not to match your requirements.

[josephg]

I use intellij on Linux and macos.

It looks mostly ok, but on Linux it doesn’t support smooth scrolling (even though this is supported by gtk). You also can’t use the meta key (windows key / cmd) as a modifier key for keyboard shortcuts. So I can’t configure intellij to use all the keyboard bindings I’m used to from macos. Again, this isn’t a problem with other gtk apps. It’s just (apparently) a platform limitation of whatever Java toolkit they’re using.

So in my experience it’s 95% of the way there. I certainly prefer it over Xcode, but it has issues that native apps don’t have.

[silon42]

SWT was pretty good in my experience.

[ptx]

SWT is even better now.

First of all, up-to-date official packages are now published to Maven Central as part of the release process, so you can just add it as a dependency as easily as with any other library. Until recently you would have had to either fiddle around with Eclipse's alternative package management system, download it manually or use someone's unofficial Maven artifact. But that's now resolved.

Secondly, if you bundle a Java runtime customized with jlink (as is recommended these days), an SWT application is actually smaller than a Swing application. When you don't use Swing, you can exclude the entire "java.desktop" module, which is slightly larger than the SWT libraries.

[amatheus]

Regarding Java I think that's more of a Jetbrains thing that IntelliJ feels good on every platform than Java per se. Contrast it with Netbeans for a more "pure" Java desktop experience.

[cmrdporcupine]

I've been an JetBrains (IntelliJ and these days CLion) user since about 2004 and what I'd say is this was a hard fought and slow incremental advancement. Back in the 00s, IDEA's UI experience was really sub-par and its foreign nature on the platform was very very clear.

It's amazing the amount of work JetBrains has put into this.

[thiht]

When it comes to Java GUIs, Intellij is the exception, not the rule.

[bitexploder]

Ahh, well, it is the only one I use so, just a slight bias there :-D

[Kwpolska]

It’s mostly an IntelliJ thing. All other Java apps are ugly and weird.

And there are non-native behaviors in IntelliJ too. For example you can’t close windows by double-clicking the window icon on Windows (a feature of Windows since Windows 1?).

[nicoburns]

> Unless a Rust OS is created with an official toolkit, Rust apps will always exist on a platform that already has a native toolkit.

If the toolkit is good enough it's entirely possible that a platform or platforms may adopt it as their native toolkit. In any case, these are really competing with electron which is already non-native. If Rust toolkits can get to electron-like quality but with lower resource usage and better hooks into the underlying platform then I'd consider that a success.

[pjmlp]

With exception of VSCode, the only Electron apps that I use are forced upon me due to work requirements.

All of them I glady ignore on private owned computers, or use the browser version, they are anyway Web apps.

[madeofpalk]

> In any case, these are really competing with electron which is already non-native

Use Electron and you'll get OS-native buttons and other form controls.

[Strom]

Can you provide any source/documentation on how to achieve this?

As far as I know Electron is based on Chromium. And Chromium doesn't use native controls, it has its own custom controls that sometimes look similar to native controls.

[oDot]

Some apps have their own unique look and that works quite well. Doesn't feel out of place for me.

[d12bb]

Depends. Highly specialized apps (Blender comes to mind) fare better using custom toolkits. Anything else probably should use the platform-native one, not only for looks (lots of really great mac-only apps use customized widgets, see Things as example), but feel and integration as well.

[mroche]

I feel like it's a spectrum. The simpler the app, the more likely it's better to try an integrate with a closer to native look. I always found the issue of "native" to be a bit funny to me as someone coming from the 3D/VFX space, since all of the applications are built to be multiplatform and don't give a hoot about "native". Consistency of the application experience across platforms trumps all. The number of people I've seen complain about this? Zero. Usually the only issues arise around file pickers (some have custom ones, others use platform ones which have differences).

Granted these applications boast a ridiculous amount of features and are incredibly complex putting them on the opposite end of the spectrum compared to simple GUIs and chat/productivity applications.

To me, it's nice that platforms provide native toolkits* to provide this level of integration. But I don't view any app as "native" unless it comes from the party making the platform, as they are really the only ones that actually have to adhere to their human interface guidelines to the fullest extent.

* On Linux this is more up-in-the-air. I personally don't consider GTK and Qt as native toolkits, but the foundational pairing for things like libadwaita and KDE Frameworks which provide the associated platform widgets and HIG. Using the toolkits directly is fine and will mostly work, but it's not the same as a "native" application.

[ruph123]

You can write GTK applications in Rust: https://www.gtk.org/docs/language-bindings/rust/

[dpcx]

You can, but its documentation is (was?) a horrid mess of C examples that make it quite difficult to navigate.

[jeroenhd]

This was my experience as well. Simple windows with a button that increments a number are nice and understandable but if you try to get more complex controls working, you run into docs.

With C code often being unreadable, I found that Vala applications often have readable examples of how to use UI components. However, tooling support for Vala is extremely limited so experimenting with existing code may be a annoying. That said, I've had good experiences with opening these projects in Gnome Builder (once it got updated to work on my computer again).

If your component of choice doesn't have a Vala example, I'd resort to reading the documentation. Reverse engineering the API from the docs is often quite doable if you first look at how a component you do understand.

I've had similar problems, but worse, when I tried mixing Rust and Qt. I've never used Qt before so that doesn't help, but I found the API even less predictable in many cases, with some docs and examples several versions out of date.

I'd seriously consider just shipping a WINE'd Windows binary (using a tool like https://winepak.github.io/) for Linux targets with the current state of Rust GUI platforms. The amount of game UI/custom UI libraries out there is impressive but they all feel terribly wrong when I try to use them, in the same way most Flutter apps are terrible to use on desktop.

[thiht]

> Any custom framework will always feel wrong and out of place

Pretty sure that's the wrong metric. Users don't care if the interface doesn't look exactly like the rest as long as it's good looking and feels familiar.

As a heavy VSCode user for example, I don't think it feels out of place on a mac for example. The UI is consistent in itself, and the UX is consistent with the global UX of the OS (more so than some native mac apps like Finder for instance).

The main reason I hated Java Swing apps was that they were ugly as hell, not that they didn't feel native.

[Klonoar]

I'm the author of cacao, which is the first thing in this blog post - and is a Rust wrapper around native AppKit. Anything built with it feels fine on macOS and gets most things "for free", but the issue is that nobody wants to write AppKit anymore. ;P

You can blame a variety of things for this, but it's the reality. Apple doesn't really make it easier with the newer UI approaches creeping in.

[bryanlarsen]

The first item on the list is cacao, the rust bindings for AppKit. And that is IMO the best option for building MacOS apps in rust.

[silon42]

>For Linux they should either be GTK or Qt, "depending on desktop"

That's bad... ideally there should be a runtime choice between GTK / Qt.

side note... I know many people that would prefer apps on MacOS to behave like Windows/Linux (mostly about the keyboard)... and also the reverse (those are louder to complain, but a minority in my case).

[aaa_aaa]

That will probably be Fuchsia, if it lives.

[pjmlp]

Its official GUI toolkit is Flutter.

[zorr]

I think, now in 2022 it is time to let go of this idea (for cross-platform applications). What you propose means that any app that wants to be available on "all" desktop platforms has to be written at least 4 times (macOS, Windows, GTK, Qt) and few developers or organizations have the resources for that.

> Recreating widgets from scratch with GPU rendering is doomed to feel wrong to users.

Yes, and no. When these widgets try to mimic platform-native widgets we have the uncanny valley problem which makes everything feel out of place like you describe. But if we drop this constraint and design widgets with their own consistent style within the same app, we don't have this problem. Apps like the JetBrains IDE's and Todoist show that this can be done.

To me the middle-ground solution is a UI toolkit with its own widget style, that has some tie-in with platform-native things and conventions like windows, menus, notification trays and keyboard shortcuts. Essentially GTK or Qt without the focus on pixel-perfect matching of platform-widgets. I think this is what Druid is doing. Rust is in a good place for this as it is a modern language that works well on all of these platforms, with no native UI toolkit yet and a package-manager/build-system that supports multi-platform library configuration.

There will always be a place for platform-native apps but cross-platform apps have different requirements. I don't care that my todo list application or IDE does not look exactly "native" on my Macbook. However I do care that these applications look and feel similar when I use them on my Macbook vs on my Linux machines or Windows laptop. Preferably without dragging in a full web-based rendering engine a la Electron.

[dmitriid]

> But if we drop this constraint and design widgets with their own consistent style within the same app

Style is just one of many things. And it's extremely hard to properly code your own consistent UI toolkit.

On top of that every platform has a myriad of platform-specific behaviors that people expect and that you will get wrong in yours. Accessibility is the big elephant in the room. But even things like secondary focus in prompts/dialogs on MacOS (that Apple's own Catalyst and Swift forget about) is a bitch and a half to get right.

[zorr]

I agree, which is why I'm not advocating writing or designing your own toolkit. Instead we as a developer community should focus on the "next generation" of toolkits for the modern cross-platform world. Take all that we have learned from GTK, Qt, Flutter and all the web stuff and incorporate it into something new for the next 10-20 years.

Rust is a nice language for that since it is already a "next-generation" language in terms of memory safety and its momentum is still building. Projects like Druid, while far from ready, are a good starting point.

[cmrdporcupine]

The problem with this is unless you drag in something like Electron, you're inevitably going to end up using (or writing) something that just doesn't have the number of maintainers and quality development as either the native UI or an embedded webview. There's nothing with the level of development of e.g. Qt for Rust.

Which means "unsexy" things like accessibility get left by the wayside. And your users suffer.

Writing a UI kit is a huge task. It's one of those things (like so much else in our industry) where you can fairly quickly climb "stupid mountain" by getting a pile of shiny widgets on the screen; but then you look out over the valley below and realize that, holy, crap there's a whole other mountain range of things that a UI kit has to do.

It's also a tough story for Rust, in particular, because copying what other people have done with other toolkits won't really cut it. Rust's ownership semantics and general opinions don't necessarily accord well with the highly object oriented and event-loop / object-tree structure of most existing GUI toolkits.

Aside: I still don't understand why things like Electron based apps are so bloated. They seem to static link whole chunks of their own (forked) Chromium. But both Windows and Mac OS ship native webview components as part of their system which can be used instead. I've done this myself (used Edge's Chromium webview component in a VST synthesizer, and equiv webkit stuff on Mac) and binary sizes were entirely reasonable. Linux was a slightly more complicated story.

[zorr]

It's a tough story indeed, but every existing toolkit had to start from scratch at some point. If I'm not mistaken Druid had its start in 2017 (I personally contributed some stuff on the GTK bits around 2019) and it is far from ready but I see it progressing in the right direction. Accessibility is on its roadmap as well I believe.

This is why Rusts' "Are we GUI yet?" and posts like this are a good thing. Eventually some new toolkit will arise that ticks all the boxes. We are not there yet and it will require a huge amount of work.

[pg999w]

There are plenty of apps written with Electron, which has styles far from "native" UI. But most people should not think of them as wrong.

[rcarr]

There's this:

https://www.redox-os.org