@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:

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!

@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! 🤣

Just typing twts directly into my twtxt file.

Details:

• Opening my twtxt file remotely using vim scp://user@remote:port//path/to/twtxt.txt
  
• Inserting the date, time and tab part of the twt with :.!echo "$(date -Is)\t"
  
• In case I need to add a new line I just Ctrl+Shift+u, type in the 2028 and hit Enter
  
• In order to replay, you just steal a twt hash from your favorite Yarn instance.
  

It looks tedious, but it’s fun to know I can twt no matter where I am, as long as can ssh in.

@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! 🤣

@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”?

@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 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.)

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… 🤣🤣🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (… I am making a Zalgo Generator in Python right now, because I need it for something else … 🤣)

@bender@twtxt.net LOl so much or building a RSPVP thinty™ ma bob 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Ohhh! Well, this Sunday is even more unlikely as I’m probably helping a mate in the woods. But maybe we’re quicker than I think.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s way more expensive and time-consuming in the end. If only somebody had warned us!!1

The triangle reminds me of zalgo text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They’re seriously telling us at work: “Can it be AI’d? Do it, don’t waste time!” Shit like that is the result. (What’s this weird gray triangle in the bottom right corner?)

Because OP twtxt seems to be a cross-post from the Fediverse, I am bringing some context here. It refers to this GitHub issue. This comment explains why the issue described is happening:

This is usually due to notarization checks. E.g. the binaries are checked by the notarization service (‘XProtect’) which phones home to Apple. Depending on your network environment, this can take a long time. Once the executable has been run the results are usually cached, so any subsequent startup should be fast.

OP network must be running on 1,200 Baud modem, or less. 🤭 I have never, ever, experienced any distinguishable delays.

@javivf@adn.org.es not having any issues on my M4 mini, no. Smooth. There are some visual discordances I don’t like, but if I give them a blind eye I can live with them. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org it hasn’t happened yet. It is this coming Saturday.

@arne@uplegger.eu @movq@www.uninformativ.de Der reine Spielzeugladen im Nachbarort hat auch schon vor Jahren dicht gemacht. Online gibt’s das halt alles deutlich günstiger.

Turned out I didn’t make it, sorry. Maybe next time. I hope you had a great yarn, @prologic@twtxt.net and @bender@twtxt.net, and didn’t waste any time waiting for me.

@arne@uplegger.eu Reicht, wenn die Kinder lernen, wie Arbeit und Disziplin geht. https://movq.de/v/e92f4b59ec/capitalism.mp4

@bender@twtxt.net It certainly doesn’t here. I’ve even traced it’s network calls. it makes none.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I see. Yeah, you might be right. (Still a fragile process due to the general AI wonkiness, but it can help to some degree, yes.)