Hi, it is a bit of follow-up of ancor playing with tk and its ruby DSL. I write idea that I like for UI design to use WYSIWYG instead of programmer created UI from programming language. My previous experience was just with visual basic ( 20 years ago ) and netbeans one for swing ( 12 years ago )[1].
My quick search shows glade, qt designer and camelot. Glade is for gtk and as we do not support now gtk backend I do not explore it too much. Camelot on other hand looks quite focused on database representation so also not much for us. So I explore and play a bit with qt designer. At first I was quite surprised that I do not find qt designer and it looks like it is now only part of qt creator ( qt IDE ), at least I do not find own rpm or how to start it. So I create testing project and start. The output is ui file which is XML based, so quite easy to parse and hard to read for human. But looks quite promising for us to parse it and e.g. try to show ncurse equivalent. Widgets in XML has its id, so it should be easy to connect widgets with actions in programming language as for us the direct connect in designer does not make much sense and I do not like it much. I think that GUI layout should be in WYSIWYG, but connection to data model should be in code. I try layouts available and I am not sure if it is limitation of designer or qt, but all layouts are quite trivial and nothing like Spring Layout[2] in Netbeans which allows to specify constrains on widgets like align left side to center of this widget and have right side align with left of different widget. Situation with layouts was even worse for me and I failed to create design that works well with resizing of window ( maybe issue was that I use MainDialog as base? ). Probably issue on my side, but it says something about usability of designer. Nice feature is also builtin tooltips and translations, but I worry how easy will be to use gettext for translations instead of qt built-in localization. There are some widgets that are currently not supported by libyui. What I like in designer is clear separation of input and display widgets. So it is clear which ones are for displaying info and which should be used for getting data. I try to design more complex menu with submenus and it works nicely in designer. Overall qt designer for me is comparable to visual basic experience 20 years ago and still not so nice experience as netbeans designer 12 years ago. So if you know better WYSIWYG designer that I overlook, please write it. But still it is better then write own one, so maybe in future I will try to write trivial ui file displayer in libyui bindings or directly in yast with ycp-ui-bindings. Josef [1] https://netbeans.apache.org//kb/docs/java/quickstart-gui.html [2] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/layout/spring.html
