SimpleIDE (opens in new tab)

I've wanted to create an IDE which uses a multi-window design. I think most IDEs are just doing a left-drawer bottom-drawer layout where the left drawer has all your files in a tree and the bottom drawer has your terminal. I've somewhat recently taken to detaching the solution explorer from the main window in Visual Studio and I'm kind of enjoying it. It's like what used to be GIMP's original default interface, with a main editing canvas and a few floating toolboxes

Also check out BlueJ https://www.bluej.org/. It's a simple IDE targeted for students learning Java.

BlueJ is Zen-simple but surprisingly usable for real work. If I could have only one IDE and had to choose between minimal and bloated, I'd pick minimal every time.

Haha, I laughed when you said this. I've only been writing it for a little over two months now. But thank you!

Seeing as how it's written in VB.Net, and 3 more of his 5 total public projects are also VB.Net, I don't think "selfless" really fits; I'll bet this project very much scratches this man's own itch.

Dedicated for sure though, and commendable, especially since it's FOSS.

I will be trying this later this week and can report back, if you like.

That this popped up on HN is fortunate, and oddly specific to my needs. I'm in a position where I have to support some legacy .NET software for the manufacturers we service and prefer working in Linux when and if possible, so this IDE seems targeted to me. Looking forward to giving it a shot and seeing if it replaces VSCodium in my routine.

Personally I love the web-tooling, they've abused the dynamicism of JS/TS for the benfit of developer experience to the point where others tools often feels cramping when wanting to do something really quickly.

And webviews are simple to start within some host language, I have my own mini-webview-host written in .NET that provides functions for file IO, file-selection dialogs,etc.

Outside of that, more serious seemingly still viable non-lowlevel (QT/GTK) non-web cross-platform options:

- Dart/flutter seems very popular, it's a new language to learn for most but seems to have been given the chance to mature and seems to be gaining.

- in the .NET world Avalonia (desktop focused, inheris a lot from WPF architecturally and has a paid crossplatform WPF shim)

- Also .NET, MAUI (better for more "mobile" like/focused designs).

- If you're doing games and are already rendering polygons, IMGui seems to be the go-to option.

- Lazarus (Pascal) seems to still carry the old VB/Delphi torch.

That said, what I'd love to see pesonally is for library developers to start looking at sane/fast ways to develop UI applications with modern language features to have non-insane state management. Either as thin shims over the existing lowlevel libraries or as first-class support.

C++ and Java has evolved a lot just in the past 10 years, as have some other languages.

But the web-focus seems to have left desktop UI development in a rut outside of new players for new languages.

If it doesn't have to be VB.NET, then JetBrains Rider (free for non-commercial development) + C# + Avalonia as the GUI framework will bring you the closest to your "best" way.

If it does, this SimpleIDE might be an option but also it might be so that the only good option would be Visual Studio... which requires Windows. But switching to it will give you two more options - WinForms and WPF - both are old but tested GUI frameworks.

No, I'm sorry, SimpleIDE was designed specifically for targeting Linux.

> I've been looking into "best" ways of creating Windows GUI apps from Linux and apart from C/Cpp with native Windows APIs most options seem to focus on React Native and web technologies.

Have you considered Lazarus? I use it with plain C for the logic (not C++).

>Python still isn't where BASIC was in the 1990's.

As a person who is still quite bummed that he compleatly missed VisualBASIC for various reasons, and is even more disappointed that Livecode rug-pulled their opensource version, and has never found a GUI development system for Python which feels comfortable, this rings true.

Still working to finish up my current project (essentially text-based 3D modeling using (Open)PythonSCAD), and suffering analysis-paralysis for the successor to it (a scriptable drawing program which integrates with it), but hopefully something obvious will present itself for cross-platform opensource graphical app development.

You can have it on VB.NET with Forms, though.

Definitely a great deal of nostalgia for me. Years ago, I had written this project up from scratch and later lost all my source code in an accident.

I learned about vibe coding two months ago and, wow, writing this with Claude has been lots of fun. Almost to the point in the project of having full AI integration in the IDE.

Still using COBOL too. I know of a system that has both! Once it works reliably most businesses want to treat code like plumbing - don't touch it until it's broken.

I am curious, what do you have in mind? For me AI is just doing busywork.

And what makes this project significant is there's a lack of VB.NET tools on Linux.

It has been challenging trying to get Gtk 3 widgets to play nice. Finally just rolled my own custom-drawn editor, treeview, and listbox. Going to release them later in a library.

The WinForms designer (drag-n-drop GUI) isn't fully supported on Linux - SimpleIDE likely focuses on code editing rather than visual design, as the .NET MAUI/WinForms designers remain Windows-centric despite .NET's cross-platform capabilities.

Well, that would certainly be a stretch goal. Right now its all code.

Yep. BASIC, then VB 6, then VB.NET because I randomly found a cool looking app that turned out to be written for .NET Framework 1.1.

Wait, who is cutting onions?

Looking into it! :D

Ha, found: https://github.com/tanathos/ClippyVS

Updated. Thx.