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Comment by hermitcrab | Hacker News Reader

Some of us are still programming in Qt using just C++ and .ui files. Never bothered to switch to QML. I wasn't convinced there were enough advantages to make it worth the effort.

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I've been writing a UI framework for experiment automation and small tools using Qt Widgets with Python bindings (https://puzzlepiece.readthedocs.io) and it still works pretty well! I like the API, and it being immediately cross-platform is very useful. It does lack looks on Windows a little imo, but to be honest I'm not opposed to the utilitarian way the apps end up looking.

The 'Fusion' style on Windows looks a bit slicker than the base Windows style IMO.

I always wanted to check out https://qskinny.github.io/ it looks compelling and sticks to c++

Hah, that is awesome. How does Qt fare these days in the non-Linux world though?

Good on Windows. Pretty good on Mac, but never quite looks 100%. Not sure how well Qt is going to cope with macOS 26 style transparency though.

This weekend I asked Gemini Pro to create a Python Qt app (a serial file sender- something you'd use to send g-code files to a CNC machine or laser cutter). I did most of the dev on Windows but the app will run exactly the same on all 3 main platforms. Eventually I asked Gemini to extract the UI to its own .ui file, which it did. The resulting app worked better than the previous one I had coded myself (handling some various race conditions and other challenging issues much more quickly than me).

If I wanted, I coudl ask gemini to port the app to C++. (Gemini isn't the point here- that's just speeding up what I would have done on my own).

Nearly every widely-used commercial or in-house tool in the VFX and Animation sector of M&E are Qt based. The main difference compared to tradition desktop developers is the general attitude of design; the industry takes the stance of providing the same application experience across platforms, rather than trying to adhere to each platforms' UI/UX guidelines.

Examples: Autodesk Maya, 3DS Max, Mudbox Foundry Nuke, Mari, Katana SideFX Houdini Substance Painter, Designer

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