On Tuesday, May 30, 2023 at 6:36:48 PM UTC-7, Christopher G. Mason wrote:
Would something like wxWidgets be helpful here? There exists C#/.NET bindings.....
I used wxWidgets for a project once. They based their design on Windows MFC, which is what I used for the original CiderPress.
The world seems to be moving to XAML-style user interface coding. There's a bit of a learning cliff, but once you get used to them they're actually kind of nice to work with. I figured the best bet for writing something that will be usable for another
20 years is to embrace recent trends. (CiderPress was first released March 2003.)
I'm not sure it's still the case that native controls are the best. GUI toolkits can use hardware-accelerated rendering to provide a consistent interface across platforms without the speed hit that used to be associated with doing that. There are some
things that you'd like to be the same across all apps on a platform, like file dialogs and font pickers, but WPF doesn't exactly provide those anyway. (20 years later and there still isn't a dialog that lets you pick both files and folders... and the
folder picker is still awful.)
In any event, the command-line tools should work on most modern systems, and won't break down when the next great GUI reimagining comes along. Sector editing is kind of tedious, but you can't have everything. :-)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)