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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. It's very hard. Besides Qt, what other toolkits are available that go beyond basic UI and offer complex widgets like grids and stuff?

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There are at least GTK+, JavaFX, Swing and wxwidgets.

Do they have complex widgets like grids and stuff? I have worked with wxWidgets for a while and for anything besides basic fields you had to put in a lot of work and code from scratch. I can definitely see the appeal of Electron and reusing web apps and frameworks.

Makes we wonder if Electron apps really have to suck up that much memory. Could the framework be tuned to use less?

> Do they have complex widgets like grids and stuff?

Yes, they all have complex widgets like grids and stuff. Grids being layout managers, not widgets.

I guess I meant grid as in data grid to show data from a database, not layout. With wxWidgets it got tedious once you needed sorting, filtering or paging.

On the web I have a lot of choice, also in .NET. Not so much in qt or wxwidgets. I have seen some very nice Java desktop apps recently so maybe that's a good choice now despite a not so good reputation.

What do you mean with you don't have much choice with Qt? Its view-model architecture lets you basically use any source of data you like in the backend.

I am talking about UI widgets like grids with sorting, grouping, filtering, resizable headers or diagrams, charts, gauges and other stuff. On the web and in .NET you have dozens of choices that look very good whereas on qt I haven't seen much third party support.

Can you post a screenshot of such a "grid" widget? Because in Qt a grid just refers to a layout where you can place arbitrary widgets.

Look at this for example: https://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WPF/Grid/

Qt has a built in table widget [1], which although it's very powerful, doesn't come with that many features out of the box. And neither does .NET (or HTML), because what you linked is a 3rd party component which costs a lot of money. Not sure where you could buy something like that for Qt though.

1. http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtablewidget.html

"costs a lot of money"

It's super cheap when you have to get something done quickly. The functionality you get is insane.

I have looked around for qt but there wasn't much. And what I found didn't look very good.

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