Go Qt, perhaps?

Posted Sep 28, 2010 19:06 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: Go Qt, perhaps? by smokeing
Parent article: Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

The same could be said for GTK+, FLTK, or any number of other GUI toolkits. Which one they use is more or less irrelevant. Qt is likely the most advanced and easiest to use of them all, though (I'm a big GNOME fan myself, and I can't stand KDE at all, but I really wish GTK+ would bite the dust and Qt would become the de facto standard -- GTK+ is lightyears behind Qt in just about every way).

That said, converting an entire codebase to a new toolkit is a truly massive undertaking. It's also one that's relatively difficult to do piecemeal. Without a really solid reason to do so -- which entails some use case where the existing toolkit simply doesn't work -- I don't foresee a toolkit change.

Go Qt, perhaps?

Posted Sep 29, 2010 1:09 UTC (Wed) by smokeing (guest, #53685) [Link] (2 responses)

> The same could be said for GTK+, FLTK, or any number of other GUI toolkits.
No, not all toolkits are born equal, and while yes, gtkmm might be up for the task (inkscape uses it, to everyone's satisfaction I believe), it would be natural to use something natively written in C++. And that is Qt. Look at Scribus.

No arguing it may be, in the short term, as unrewarding a task as it appears impossible. Ultimately, though, UI designers^w^w even the dreariest clerks will start to laugh at the 1990-ish look of OOo. Even the most conservative toolkit, GTK+, makes passes at OpenGL-enabled widgets (Clutter project), which I do believe will become as useful as a well-tuned compiz in lieu of your default wm.

Go Qt, perhaps?

Posted Sep 29, 2010 6:48 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

even the dreariest clerks will start to laugh at the 1990-ish look of OOo. Even the most conservative toolkit, GTK+, makes passes at OpenGL-enabled widgets

OOo has usability problems, but the lack of shine and glitter in widgets is not one of them... I'm desperately hoping the "new management" will not get sidetracked with eye candy, and instead will address the more serious problems first. Eg. try to do something about the ridiculous resource usage, which is one place where using a standard toolkit could actually help, provided the same toolkit (and version!) is used by other programs running on the same machine. This would be the case with QT in a KDE environment, or GTK on Gnome.

Go Qt, perhaps?

Posted Sep 29, 2010 21:10 UTC (Wed) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

And, if undertaken in earnest, porting it to Qt will help separate the many processing and rendering layers the editable stuff goes through in OOo. Heck, I remember, around 2004, I had OOo 1.x installed on a Mac, and saw it bring along the entire X server to run on!

If an interested observer were to demonstrate a QT port patch that at least brings up part of the suite in not too ugly a way (a proof of concept) then I would be not at all surprised to see our new Libreoffice stewards react in favor of at least opening up an experimental branch.