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Comment by vincnetas | Hacker News Reader

Im gonna be grumpy old man. It's nice to play with new things, but it's really sad when UI conventions from OS is not implemented. This makes using this UI very frustrating:

Triple click on the text. Expected whole paragraph to be selected.

In input field click Cmd+A to select all text. Does not work as expected on mac.

Copy paste does not work.

Start selecting text but release mouse outside of the widget. Text selecting gets stuck.

Text navigation in text field does not work Cmd - left/right.

And these are from 5 minutes of playing with it.

ps: im on mac+safari

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Ok, let's try to say "the glass is already 20% full, not 80% empty" - there are still lots of things missing, but hey, it's still early days...

My pet peeve with most "home-grown" GUI frameworks is relatively subtle and probably hard to implement, but it's an example why developing a GUI framework (especially a platform-independent one) from scratch is hard: no subpixel rendering for text (only "classic" antialiasing). This makes these UIs look strange on a "normal-DPI" monitor (which are getting rarer these days, but I still have some and I'm not gonna throw them away anytime soon).

Agreed. I always think I’ll one day build my own UI framework. Drawing to the screen and computing layouts is manageable, but then I think about the details: widget focus, text selection, platform keyboard shortcuts, text rendering (which encompasses things like right-to-left text rendering, ligatures, and a million other hateful complexities), etc and I realize why there are so few toolkits out there.

I do think it would be interesting to define a minimal set of user interface conventions that would forego a lot of features but would allow developers to stand a fighting chance of building a UI toolkit. If it became popular enough, users could come to understand its conventions even if they aren’t platform native (not ideal, but something has to change).

Something a lot of people re implementing GUI toolkits on OSX might not realize is that emacs/readline shortcuts work in all of the textfields (since ctrl is more or less "free" thanks to the command key.) IMO the GUI toolkit is one of those things OSX got really right and if you're not going to bother using it you might as well just target X11 and save yourself the trouble of putting effort into your OSX port.

The bindings are also customizable in `~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict`.

I have been following Gio development for quite some time, and it's still in the early stages. Text selection was added recently. It could be better but it's a good start.

Double click to select a word and triple click to select paragraph doesn't work for me either but can't reproduce some of the other issues running it natively.

I tried it on Firefox Android, the text I write doesn't appear until I close the keyboard or press space. It is also extremely slow, like 5 FPS slow, scrolling is painful and the ripple animation in buttons lags too much. Long press to select text doesn't work, double tap selects a single word but doesn't use the native selection that gives me two handles to select more text to the left or right, the navigation keys on the keyboard are all disabled and so are the select and copy buttons. Line splitting is a mess and not properly done, here's a screenshot of some of the issues https://i.imgur.com/ApHDGuQ.jpg

I think this is more of an artifact of the browser/WebGL things still being experimental. I don’t observe broken behaviours around copy paste or text selection if I run the example apps natively.

Also, no accessibility. macOS has amazing support for making its UI accessible to a wider variety of people, but immediate mode UIs throw this all out the window.

I can't right-click a static/input text selection and get a menu (whether a browser menu or a non-native menu) with the ability to copy and paste and such.

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