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Comment by gamegod | Hacker News Reader

If you're building for mobile or want a "modern" UI, go with Qt Quick. If you're building for the desktop, and want a conventional UI, use Qt Widgets.

I'd go with Qt Widgets by default, unless I was building an app that needed very strong branding, a unique UI, and had design help, then I'd go with Qt Quick. Curious to hear what others think.

(I've built a handful of desktop apps with Qt, but they're all tools for music or radio, so a flashy flat UI never made sense, so I've always stuck with Qt Widgets. No regrets.)

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Where would the graphics view framework fit? Wouldn't that potentially be a good fit for modern UI on desktop when you want a custom and consistent look-and-feel on all platforms?

Graphics View is just a fancy widget for when you want to do loads of custom drawing of "items" on a canvas. "Qt provides [a] powerful graphics engine that supports easy visualization of items, with support for rotation and zooming. Additionally it provides an event propagation architecture for interaction." --> This is what QGraphicsView and QGraphicsScene accomplish for you.

See:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qgraphicsview.html

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qgraphicsscene.html

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/examples-graphicsview.html

Take a look at the types of applications they used for the examples. It'd be a good solution for something like a CAD layout widget, or maybe a maps widget. You use it together with Qt Widgets or Qt Quick, not instead of it.

> Where would the graphics view framework fit? Wouldn't that potentially be a good fit for modern UI on desktop when you want a custom and consistent look-and-feel on all platforms?

Qt Quick 1 was based on QGraphicsScene / QGraphicsView. Qt Quick 2 was created because they couldn't achieve the performance they wanted (60 fps animations on mobile basically) with the QPainter API and QGraphicsScene.

It still has its uses for technical apps I would say - I personnally use it for the main view of ossia score (https://ossia.io) and am able to get 120 fps with thousands of elements on a 4k screen... so I'm not too stressed about it :-)

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