> I can say it involves a serious amount of of non-intuitive hand-coding and feels annoyingly hard and slow as compared to WinForms and WPF. It is most probably going to get easier and faster with experience
No, it won't get easier, because the technology is flawed. If you want easy you use HTML. There is a reason all new complex applications are written in Electron.
The reason isn't a flaw in technology, because many alternatives to electron do in fact offer markup language like GUI creation and css/html like styling including Qt with its QML offshoot, or JavafX.
Not to mention that I don't see any obvious reason why HTML would be easier to use than the WPF / Swing / Glade Gui-builder paradigm. As a not web-developer, I certainly have less issues building a Gui the good old fashioned way than having to learn HTML.
It honestly baffles me that anyone would consider HTML to be a good fit for a complex desktop application. I am actually very glad that I can drag buttons on a canvas and click on elements to understand their apis and adjust settings visually. I am not excited about building complex gui's by interacting with plain text that was designed to put text on webpages.
The reason why Electron has dominated has a much more trivial reason. There are a lot of web developers, and the javascript ecosystem is so large that it allows the quick reuse of a lot of code, saving those developers a lot of time.
> many alternatives to electron do in fact offer markup language like GUI creation and css/html like styling including Qt with its QML offshoot, or JavafX.
> Not to mention that I don't see any obvious reason why HTML would be easier to use than the WPF
Can I use Vue.js or React over QML? That's a point many people miss. You think of HTML/JavaScript as the thing from 10 years ago that maybe you played with in school.
Vue.js/React is to HTML/CSS what WPF is to raw Win32 GUI programming.
> Can I use Vue.js or React over QML? That's a point many people miss. You think of HTML/JavaScript as the thing from 10 years ago that maybe you played with in school.
I'm not the author of the commend above but I actually do.
> Vue.js/React is to HTML/CSS what WPF is to raw Win32 GUI programming
Good explanation if it's true, thanks.
> Can I use Vue.js or React over QML? That's a point many people miss.
Does modern QML really lack facilities that solve the same problems with comparable ease?
I'm scared away from HTML/Electron as it seems (perhaps I'm wrong) that means I am going to have to also use Photoshop (which I'm particularly bad at) and design literally every bit of the UI from scratch while what I want is a set of classic widgets to layout on a form quickly (the way I do in VisualStudio and Qt Designer). I have experience of using HTML, CSS and vanilla JS to make classic web pages and I can't even imagine how to html/css-code something that is going to look and work like a reasonably complex desktop application. Also as @mherrmann has once mentioned "Do you know how JavaScript sorts numbers? Alphabetically. ’nuff said.". At least but not at last Electron apps are so slow to start and so hardware-hungry I actually doubt it is going to become a truly mainstream platform for desktop applications.
BTW the technology doesn't look flawed any more (arguably it is less flawed) than WinForms is. If only Trolltech would consider developing a WinForms-style (or call it Delphi-style) RAD studio (that would provide click-to-code experience, a visual BackgroundWorker component etc and let you customize everything visually instead of only doing the actual form design job like Qt Designer) a worthy investment PyQt5 apps development could be made a breeze.
> means I am going to have to also use Photoshop (which I'm particularly bad at) and design literally every bit of the UI from scratch while what I want is a set of classic widgets to layout on a form quickly
Exactly. What is the react/vue/html/css alternative for this? Because when I look around, I find ways of doing it but people generally do not seem to use them so they end up being abandoned. There is no reason why it cannot be simularly easy, but, as far as I see, people using these technologies like to keep things complex for the design-challenged among us.
> At least but not at last Electron apps are so slow to start and so hardware-hungry I actually doubt it is going to become a truly mainstream platform for desktop applications
Nobody is going to write a Photoshop or a music production software in Electron. You need C++ for that kind of stuff. Neither PyQt or WinForms cuts it. Apps like that use custom GUIs built directly over OpenGL/Direct3D.
But I have a feeling your app is no Photoshop either.
No, it won't get easier, because the technology is flawed. If you want easy you use HTML. There is a reason all new complex applications are written in Electron.