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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

this is made in wxWidgets by the way, a cross platform c++ GUI framework like Qt but 100% free

on the other hand inkscape is made with gtkmm(gtk), which also runs cross platform.

For some values of "works". Inkscape is close to unusable on MacOS because it goes through the X server and every interaction is really slow.

why is that, never used it on Macos myself, but gtk/gtkmm does claim to have Macos support and I would not expect some X server got involved.

The contents are rendered through gtk/cairo which not only goes through https://www.xquartz.org/ but also doesn't use GPU rendering (it was experimental 3 years ago, maybe better now). The main issue seems to be that neither Inkscape nor gtk people have low level Darwin experts or time available to invest in debugging the whole rendering stack. See for example https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1614 and all the other referenced issues for all the gory details.

This is very insightful, thank you. This might make me switch back to wxWidgets in fact. Desktop GUI is new to me and I have been trying electronjs(too fat), wxwidgets, gtk, flutter, maybe even Kotlin, looks like I will stick to wxWidgets.

Make sure it applies to your situation specifically though. I'm not sure if that's a generic gtk issue or gtk-as-inkscape-uses-it issue.

Also, if you want another one for your collection, I've been very happy with Avalonia for desktop UI (haven't done custom drawing in it though)

know nothing about c# :(

Audacity will switch to Qt/QML for version 4 because wxWidgets just keeps getting in the way.

surprised,any specifics? and why not gtk since wxwidgets uses gtk underneath for Linux,and gtk works for win and Mac too,easier to port it seems

"Qt has better support on MacOS(but GTK4 is doing well with MacOS nowadays), and the team uses Qt for another product so it makes sense to do audacity in Qt as well"

How does wxw and gtk roughly compare? I have liked the UI of Audacity moderately more than Inkscape, but I don't know where framework versus implementation is at play.

wxWidgets uses whatever GUI functionality is native for each OS instead of implementing its own (though there is also a wxUniversal backend which does its own controls but i'm not sure how complete it is). On Linux wxWidgets can use Gtk, Qt or Motif (though Motif doesn't seem to be tested much and while it does compile and work, there are a bunch of bugs).

I was with wxwidgets now switching to gtk, as the latter is way more widely used, wxwidgets is native looking for each OS, gtk has its own appearance, both shall do fine.

Audacities OS UI theme is really bad on MacOS. I love audacity but it really could use a modern theme like Gtk 3.

just installed via brew to MacOS, looks great to me. I wish HN let me post a screenshot.

link to imgur or something similar...

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