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by grishka 1016 days ago
That same Microsoft solved that nicely in win32 by using "DLUs", or "dialog units", for layouts. These scale with the font.
1 comments

DLUs solve the wrong problem.

You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

> You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

What kind of extra work DO they need? I can only think of RTL layouts but I don't remember whether win32 "dialogs" loaded from resources automatically mirror the layout for RTL languages.

> Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

Desktop Linux is an unfixable dumpster fire UX-wise. Don't even get me started.

A serious problem with many open-source GUIs, but especially those on Linux, is that they're built backwards: you first write the code, then build the UI. Your UI ends up being shaped by the underlying implementation of the thing it controls. When in reality you want to do it the other way around: you'd formulate user requirements ("they need to be able to do X and Y"), you'd think through all possible scenarios that the UI must accommodate, you'd make a rough outline of what a UI satisfying all these requirements would look like, and only THEN would you start actually writing any code.

> Desktop Linux is an unfixable dumpster fire UX-wise.

This is exactly how I feel about Windows. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.