zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

>>Olympi+EJ
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.

On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.

>>namelo+FQ
This is another common excuse.

You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/

You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc

>>Olympi+pT
I'd love to see some opensource projects actually do a good job of this. Its a lot of work, especially if you want:

- Good cross platform support (missing in filepilot)

- Want applications to feel native everywhere. For example, all the obscure keyboard shortcuts for moving around a text input box on mac and windows should work. iOS and Android should use their native keyboards. IME needs to work. Etc

- Accessibility support for people who are blind and low vision. (Screen readers, font scaling, etc)

- Ergonomic language bindings

Hitting these features is more or less a requirement if you want to unseat electron.

I think this would be a wonderful project for a person or a small, dedicated team to take on. Its easier than it ever used to be thanks to improvements in font rendering, cross platform graphics libraries (like webgpu, vulcan, etc) and improvements in layout engines (Clay). And how much users have dropped their standards for UI consistency ever since electron got popular and microsoft gave up having a consistent UI toolkit in windows.

There are a few examples of teams doing this in house (eg Zed). But we need a good opensource project.

>>joseph+YG1
We're actually working on a native open source cross-platform UI toolkit called Slint that’s trying to do exactly that. https://slint.dev