I also think Qt/QML is a very underrated technology. I have been developing a handwritten notes for Linux/Windows using Qt Quick for quite some time [0]. The experience has been a mixed bag though.
I've encountered tons of bugs (many of them still unfixed) that I had to find very ugly workarounds for.
Also, while a declarative style UI language can have a lot of benefits, it does have a lot of limitations. For example, in my application I required a (infinite) canvas to rendering the ink strokes and which would be a perfect job for QGraphicsView, but there is no equivalent in Qt Quick. So I had to roll out my own component (which uses Skia under the hood), but that was quite painful. Since Qt 6, the Qt Quick scenegraph is rendered with a custom RHI backend (abstracting over Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL and DirectX) which I had a lot of trouble integrating with third party engines (I really wish they had a WebGPU backend).
I've always lamented that QML and QtWidgets are separate rather than integrated. It would be awesome if there was a declarative way to specify much of the same information that you have to specify programmatically with QtWidgets (e.g., the cumbersome process of defining nested sizers), and then you could write code to handle the actual "business logic". But instead we have two totally separate UI frameworks where you can either use the nice native QtWidgets or you can have a nice declarative UI definiton, but not both.
Great write-up! It would be useful if various PKMs would settle on a similar format for recording (nested) tasks, dates and metadata, as it seems to have become the standard way to store kanban boards and similar 'enhanced' views. Currently there exist various strategies ranging from embedding JSON as comments to esoteric (non-markdown) formats, often trailing at the end of each task. This makes the source look cluttered and difficult to edit/navigate.
IMO, metadata (such as date ranges) could instead be stored as empty links leading each task (or by showing a custom placeholder symbol such as '@'), paving the way for a 'linked' data format while resulting in a same-width list for easy lookups and editing:
For instance, the above tasks would link to the virtual '30..31.md' and '29..30.md' files which collect all backlinked tasks for the provided daterange (akin to Obisidan/Logseq/etc).
In an ideal world, the task marker could hold a custom symbol and linked metadata itself, but would result in non-standard (GFM) markdown:
This is brilliant work and I love the Qt ecosystem.
Can’t help but imagine the things we could’ve had if Apple wasn’t pushing the horror of Swift down everyone’s throat by blocking alternatives in so many tiny ways.
If you mean due to lack of C++ for doing GUIs, Google and Microsoft have also long left C++ to the dust, in what concerns GUI frameworks.
Even Microsoft, for all its C++ use, has never produced anything better than MFC to this day, and only Windows team cares about XAML C++, others rather use React Native or Webview2 alongside C++.
It is up to third parties to use frameworks like Qt.
I mean specific APIs and targets are required to be written in Swift (e.g. widgets) + iOS/macOS dev tooling is hostile to any attempt at bringing in your own preferred language stack. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's "glasses" or other tiny devices make it even harder to stray from the "one true path".
Swift and SwiftUI on macOS are the most complete UI framework that is native, fast, performant and works very well.
Basically no other platform comes even close in terms of ease of use and performance. The best would be to extend that kind of framework on Windows (and/or Linux) and make it work same / similar.
Looks great, and it has some features and polish that I would love Logseq to have natively, but overall I prefer the customisation potential of logseq with tags, templates, block refs etc.
I've worked with QtWidgets and I have mixed feelings about the extensive (1) documentation about integrating C++ with QML and QtQuick.
Here's a quick history lesson (as I understand it):
- QtWidgets the original C++ QT graphics library.
- Around 2008 or something, they introduced QML and QtQuick. This was basically declarative UI + javascript for logic.
- QtWidgets is considered 'done' and all new features and dev is basically happening in QML / QtQuick.
- ...as described in this post, the current recommended 'best practice' is to avoid writing a pile of javascript spaghetti and bridge between C++ for logic and QML for UI.
So, long story short: We've moved from a robust C++ framework, to a javascript backed framework to 'appeal to the masses', but it's kind of hard to build a whole application that way, and so 'best practice' is to go back and write your logic in C++.
Does that seem weird to anyone else?
> While powerful, Qt Widgets lack some essential modern features, in my opinion, such as declarative UI, bindings, behaviors, anchors, and more. These features enable the creation of beautiful, animated UIs simply and quickly, as seen in QML.
Hum. QML is certainly declarative.
I'd love to see a breakdown of specifically what features you can't do with widgets, and why having a js <-> c++ bridge is better than not having one.
Don't get me wrong; if you want to write a 100% javascript QML application, that's cool. Go for it... but when you're writing a C++ application and choosing, deliberately, to implement you UI in another language and communicate with that UI via a bridge...
...well, let's just say, if you had another option (eg. just use C++), wouldn't that make sense?
Couldn't you do the the same thing with react native components and logic in C++? (You could) Why is this any better than just writing a react native UI? Or a flutter UI?
You could do any kind of UI, even fully native, if you're implementing the application is c++ and then just doing cross language <-> to the ui.
Generally, QtWidgets is better suited for making traditional desktop UIs with dialog boxes, common controls, etc... It is not really in the spirit of QtWidgets to do things like custom behavior, animation, etc... You do whatever the host OS gives you, in fact, you don't even care, that's Qt's job.
QML is better suited for apps that want full control of their UIs, styling, etc... Which is a more modern way (doesn't mean better!).
It is clear that the author wants the latter, so QML it is.
And yes, it makes sense to use a different language for the UI in this case, with C++ bindings, C++ is not that great for designing UIs. In fact, with QtWidgets, you typically don't use C++ to design your UI. Instead, you use Qt Designer, a graphical tool that works on .ui files (xml), that are then compiled into C++ classes that your derive from, which is a form of binding between two languages: C++ and .ui/xml. You can use C++ directly, sometimes you have to, like when the UI is dynamically generated, but for something like a dialog box, using the graphical tool is much more convenient.
> Couldn't you do the the same thing with react native components and logic in C++? (You could) Why is this any better than just writing a react native UI? Or a flutter UI?
The tooling, that is why.
Having QtCreator, Qt Design Studio, compiling QML to native code, debugging experience.
React Native has all the gotchas from JavaScript and poor tooling for developers that never left the CLI world.
Flutter depends on Dart, a programming language that was rescued from oblivion thanks to Flutter, and is pretty much useless everywhere else.
I've encountered tons of bugs (many of them still unfixed) that I had to find very ugly workarounds for. Also, while a declarative style UI language can have a lot of benefits, it does have a lot of limitations. For example, in my application I required a (infinite) canvas to rendering the ink strokes and which would be a perfect job for QGraphicsView, but there is no equivalent in Qt Quick. So I had to roll out my own component (which uses Skia under the hood), but that was quite painful. Since Qt 6, the Qt Quick scenegraph is rendered with a custom RHI backend (abstracting over Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL and DirectX) which I had a lot of trouble integrating with third party engines (I really wish they had a WebGPU backend).
[0] https://scrivanolabs.github.io
IMO, metadata (such as date ranges) could instead be stored as empty links leading each task (or by showing a custom placeholder symbol such as '@'), paving the way for a 'linked' data format while resulting in a same-width list for easy lookups and editing:
For instance, the above tasks would link to the virtual '30..31.md' and '29..30.md' files which collect all backlinked tasks for the provided daterange (akin to Obisidan/Logseq/etc).In an ideal world, the task marker could hold a custom symbol and linked metadata itself, but would result in non-standard (GFM) markdown:
It would be up to the editor to render this metadata accordingly.Even Microsoft, for all its C++ use, has never produced anything better than MFC to this day, and only Windows team cares about XAML C++, others rather use React Native or Webview2 alongside C++.
It is up to third parties to use frameworks like Qt.
Those that think it shouldn't be, end up yak shaving trying to bring UNIX and C concepts to platforms that no longer care about that.
Basically no other platform comes even close in terms of ease of use and performance. The best would be to extend that kind of framework on Windows (and/or Linux) and make it work same / similar.
Here's a quick history lesson (as I understand it):
- QtWidgets the original C++ QT graphics library.
- Around 2008 or something, they introduced QML and QtQuick. This was basically declarative UI + javascript for logic.
- QtWidgets is considered 'done' and all new features and dev is basically happening in QML / QtQuick.
- ...as described in this post, the current recommended 'best practice' is to avoid writing a pile of javascript spaghetti and bridge between C++ for logic and QML for UI.
So, long story short: We've moved from a robust C++ framework, to a javascript backed framework to 'appeal to the masses', but it's kind of hard to build a whole application that way, and so 'best practice' is to go back and write your logic in C++.
Does that seem weird to anyone else?
> While powerful, Qt Widgets lack some essential modern features, in my opinion, such as declarative UI, bindings, behaviors, anchors, and more. These features enable the creation of beautiful, animated UIs simply and quickly, as seen in QML.
Hum. QML is certainly declarative.
I'd love to see a breakdown of specifically what features you can't do with widgets, and why having a js <-> c++ bridge is better than not having one.
Don't get me wrong; if you want to write a 100% javascript QML application, that's cool. Go for it... but when you're writing a C++ application and choosing, deliberately, to implement you UI in another language and communicate with that UI via a bridge...
...well, let's just say, if you had another option (eg. just use C++), wouldn't that make sense?
Couldn't you do the the same thing with react native components and logic in C++? (You could) Why is this any better than just writing a react native UI? Or a flutter UI?
You could do any kind of UI, even fully native, if you're implementing the application is c++ and then just doing cross language <-> to the ui.
Right?
[1] - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-cppintegration-overview.html
QML is better suited for apps that want full control of their UIs, styling, etc... Which is a more modern way (doesn't mean better!).
It is clear that the author wants the latter, so QML it is.
And yes, it makes sense to use a different language for the UI in this case, with C++ bindings, C++ is not that great for designing UIs. In fact, with QtWidgets, you typically don't use C++ to design your UI. Instead, you use Qt Designer, a graphical tool that works on .ui files (xml), that are then compiled into C++ classes that your derive from, which is a form of binding between two languages: C++ and .ui/xml. You can use C++ directly, sometimes you have to, like when the UI is dynamically generated, but for something like a dialog box, using the graphical tool is much more convenient.
The tooling, that is why.
Having QtCreator, Qt Design Studio, compiling QML to native code, debugging experience.
React Native has all the gotchas from JavaScript and poor tooling for developers that never left the CLI world.
Flutter depends on Dart, a programming language that was rescued from oblivion thanks to Flutter, and is pretty much useless everywhere else.