@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

@bender@twtxt.net It’s a great movie, enjoy! :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yep, that’s heaps better, ta! <3

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org now that I could finally read you RSVP message (or, should I say, essay, LOL), I had to see the video, and well, https://netbros.com/1761846417/. Hahahahaha!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmmmmmmmmmmmm … guess I should take a look at Qt. 🤔 That’s the one popular toolkit that I’ve never really tried for some reason. I really don’t like C++ (might as well use Rust), so I’ll also use Python.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Also thanks mate! 🥰

In fact, it’s a great little invention

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org To be fair, I’m not convinced of the web design / user interface decisions either. I just hacked this together over a couple of days. I’m not sold on any of the UI/UX thus far. Open to suggestions, improvements, hell even a complete CSS rewrite 🤣 UI/UX nor CSS is my strong suite 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Go complain to the BeerCSS 🍻 developers 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

@bender@twtxt.net Kaboom! Hahaha, I did not think of that at all, thanks for pointing it out, mate! :‘-D

But let me clarify just in case: I honestly do not want to bash this project. In fact, it’s a great little invention. It’s just that I’m not conviced by the current user interface decisions. Anyway, web design isn’t right up my alley. I just wanted to add some fun. And luckily, at least someone liked it so far. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Don’t you worry, this was meant as a joke. :-D

There was a time when I thought that Swing was actually really good. But having done some Qt/KDE later, I realized how much better that was. That were the late KDE 3 and early KDE 4 days, though. Not sure how it is today. But back then it felt Trolltech and the KDE folks put a hell lot more thought into their stuff. I was pleasantly surprised how natural it appeared and all the bits played together. Sure, there were the odd ends, but the overall design was a lot better in my opinion.

To be fair, I never used it from C++, always the Python bindings, which were considerably more comfortable (just alone the possibility to specify most attributes right away as kwargs in the constructor instead of calling tons of setters). And QtJambi, the Java binding, was also relatively nice. I never did a real project though, just played around with the latter.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org LOLz! Way to destroy @prologic@twtxt.net’s newest playground! :-P

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The one for Delphi was quite good.

It was! I didn’t use Delphi for long, though. Dunno why, I always gravitated towards Visual Basic back then. 😅

These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

I also avoid it when possible, because … it’s exhausting, because … the tools that I have/know are “subpar”. Doing anything regarding GUIs always feels like a chore. That wasn’t the case in the VB days.

Well, I made this in ~2009 with Java/Swing and it was pretty nice to work with, custom widgets and all:

https://movq.de/v/de26d5edb3/s.png

I wouldn’t dare doing this with GTK.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Can’t tell if serious or not – because I’m actually considering this. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The one for Delphi was quite good. But JCreator (I don’t remember exactly) was awful and I never looked back to GUI designers. Always layed out the GUI by hand in code myself since then. These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Let’s see on which day we’ll finally settle.

I reckon the white-space: nowrap is a bit evil on the gatherly notes, though.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hähähä, let’s feed the trolls! :->

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Nice! :-) Since vim is quite advanced cavemanery, you could probably even remap Enter when editing the twtxt.txt.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Java/Swing!

And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. 🤔 It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasn’t super great at the time, so I didn’t start using it … and then I never questioned that decision …)

https://movq.de/v/eaa24b109b/vb.png

Theming on Qt6 is a bit unusual (you have to install qt6ct and then set an environment variable for every Qt program?), but at least pcmanfm-qt doesn’t look like brain damage anymore now. 🤔 (Except there’s no darkmode. What is this, 1980?)

https://movq.de/v/2d0d5da3d2/s.png

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, I’ll have to take a look. Appears to be Go only, doesn’t it?

I’m not quite sold yet on the idea of “immediate mode” GUIs. 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net You are totally correct! The thing is: The Caveman within was thinking how minimal can one go before things start to get too uncomfortable? And if cavemen weren’t supposed to be too self-conscious about their spelling, I could have just ssh remote echo "$(date -Is)\tTwt Twt Mother-Lover! 🤣🤣" >> /path/to/twtxt.txt and called it a day.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What about gioui?

@prologic@twtxt.net Such as? 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com yeah, it looks tedious because it is. LOL. I can twt no matter where I am because a) with Yarn is as easy as opening a web browser, and b) with jenny is as easy at SSHing to my VPS. But, the keyword is fun. That’s what matters!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What about more modern alternatives based on GLFW?

@bender@twtxt.net LOL 😂 Timezonea are hard 😆

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Love it! 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org back to this, I think @prologic@twtxt.net meant 1 November 12:00 UTC. I won’t hold it against him. 🤭

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com tell us all about it, without omitting details!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org maybe @prologic@twtxt.net managed to mess things up—we should be used to this already, right? LOL—as the meets are always on Saturdays, as early as 06:00 EDT, or whereabouts, never on a Sunday.

You want me to submit a reply with “I probably won’t show up”?

I LOLed IRL! 🤣

Airspeed
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@bender@twtxt.net Hm, are we talking about different dates or are there different timezone offsets for this timezone abbreviation? With EDT being UTC-4, 2025-11-02T12:00:00Z is Sunday at 8:00 in the morning local time for you. Or were did I mess up here? :-?

@prologic@twtxt.net You want me to submit a reply with “I probably won’t show up”?

Not that I really understand everything, but this is a really cool talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-hacking-the-rp2350

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nothing special, just fooling around in corporate chats. 🤪

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com no biggies, and welcome back!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org So you’ve RSVP’d then? 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess r/unixporn got themselves a competition xD

@bender@twtxt.net Oh! It’s all good, I was planning on retiring my TheLounge instance anyways and will stick to connecting directly for the occasional chat when needed. Cheers! (Sorry for the belated reply.)

@zvava@twtxt.net This made my day. 🤣🤣🤣 And now I’m very tempted to printing this on a T-shirt 🤣 (It could be my very fist Silk screen print ever)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org then I blame @prologic@twtxt.net, and no one else. LOL. But yeah, it is Saturday around 06:00 my time (EDT).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org then I blame @prologic@twtxt.net, and no one else. LOL. But yeah, it is Saturday around 08:00 my time (EDT).

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I got confused again, but luckily, the 2nd November 2025 at noon UTC is right on a Sunday in my timezone. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, now I’m curious what use case you have in mind. :-D

@prologic@twtxt.net Ouch, I don’t want to get hit by these projectiles! :-O Is that black tube on the bottom the remains of a chair leg?

I reckon one could collect these hail stones and put them in the drinks to work around the lost air conditioning. At least if one doesn’t mind icy drinks. (I can’t stand that, because I immediately get hickup when drinking something cold.)

Sunsets never get old: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-10-27/

The hail we had yesterday 🤯

@bender@twtxt.net There’s a reason it’s in UTC time 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org but it is Saturday… 🤣🤣🤣