[chrisldgk]

People tend to forget that React != React-DOM (i.e. HTML).

React is just a framework for declaratively defining components and reactivity, the end result can be whatever you want. That’s what react-native is for mobile apps, and as another commenter pointed out, in this case it was using React Native for Windows[1], which apparently calls native Windows APIs in the background.

I like to jump on the MS hate train as much as the next guy, but React itself is not the reason the start menu is bad.

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/react-native-windows/

[sureglymop]

Agreed and it's an important distinction to bring up. There are some pretty cool projects that use react like that, e.g., vicinae [0]. And one can implement a different renderer for react, here is a tui renderer [1].

0: https://www.vicinae.com/ 1: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink