I think Slint is getting pretty close to that these days: https://slint.dev/
No quick and easy drag&drop just yet, but IDE support for live preview rendering makes it come pretty close. I do long for the Visual Studio GUI design days, but things aren't as barebones anymore as they used to be in open source Rust land.
Funny you should say that. I remember using a Microsoft product back in the '90s that featured WYSIWYG forms. As a programmer, though, you couldn't imagine my joy at discovering I could define and configure the UI in code instead! It felt magical and far more powerful.
I will forever harp on the idea that we really set web design back by putting so much focus on the HTML. Dreamweaver sites were not great, to be sure. But they had more creativity and design than the majority of what we seem to create nowadays.
I miss WYSIWYG designers so much. I used to use them to make small apps all the time because, while I'm a good programmer, I'm awful at trying to lay out a UI in code. WinForms in Visual Studio used to be great for people like me!
WYSIWYG designers seem convenient, but they're not that popular anymore for a reason. Writing UI in code is more flexible, easier to maintain, and works better as projects grow.
Wah? WYSIWYG rules the world. Web, mobile, desktop, game dev (The UI the user sees anyway). Anything where visuals matters, WYSIWYG and predefined layouts are used.
IMGUIs are almost always relegated to debug UIs and single devs because its actually terrible to maintain something that binds presentation and business logic like IMGUIs often do (and when they don't they lose the simplicity).
WYSIWYG doesn't necessarily mean you are limited to using some designer and can't edit code. It's enough (and better) to have a live preview, than a full designer. It just means you see live what the code does, at the point when you write it, not later when you run it.
When hand-writing XAML or similar, it's great to see the UI created live. Like editing markdown and seeing the preview, versus editing markdown and not seeing the preview.
In the end the WYSIWYG would produce an XML file that you can put under version control. All depends on the UI of the thing your are building, if what you are building only needs to be functional and nobody cares about the UI (that is always the case of internal use software, that needs to have a good UX but who cares if it has the Windows 95 style controls, like machine HMIs, ERP software, etc.) WYSIWYG (like Visual Studio) are good to write things fast and typically with a consistent layout.
I mean, most companies are not building a videogame, and most people are still fine using things like AS/400, so...
But those files are often hard to read and merge.
If WYSIWYG really worked well, why aren't more big projects or popular frameworks using it? Why do you think it's become less popular over time?
I think Slint is getting pretty close to that these days: https://slint.dev/
No quick and easy drag&drop just yet, but IDE support for live preview rendering makes it come pretty close. I do long for the Visual Studio GUI design days, but things aren't as barebones anymore as they used to be in open source Rust land.
Funny you should say that. I remember using a Microsoft product back in the '90s that featured WYSIWYG forms. As a programmer, though, you couldn't imagine my joy at discovering I could define and configure the UI in code instead! It felt magical and far more powerful.
I will forever harp on the idea that we really set web design back by putting so much focus on the HTML. Dreamweaver sites were not great, to be sure. But they had more creativity and design than the majority of what we seem to create nowadays.
I miss WYSIWYG designers so much. I used to use them to make small apps all the time because, while I'm a good programmer, I'm awful at trying to lay out a UI in code. WinForms in Visual Studio used to be great for people like me!
WYSIWYG designers seem convenient, but they're not that popular anymore for a reason. Writing UI in code is more flexible, easier to maintain, and works better as projects grow.
Wah? WYSIWYG rules the world. Web, mobile, desktop, game dev (The UI the user sees anyway). Anything where visuals matters, WYSIWYG and predefined layouts are used.
IMGUIs are almost always relegated to debug UIs and single devs because its actually terrible to maintain something that binds presentation and business logic like IMGUIs often do (and when they don't they lose the simplicity).
WYSIWYG doesn't necessarily mean you are limited to using some designer and can't edit code. It's enough (and better) to have a live preview, than a full designer. It just means you see live what the code does, at the point when you write it, not later when you run it.
When hand-writing XAML or similar, it's great to see the UI created live. Like editing markdown and seeing the preview, versus editing markdown and not seeing the preview.
In the end the WYSIWYG would produce an XML file that you can put under version control. All depends on the UI of the thing your are building, if what you are building only needs to be functional and nobody cares about the UI (that is always the case of internal use software, that needs to have a good UX but who cares if it has the Windows 95 style controls, like machine HMIs, ERP software, etc.) WYSIWYG (like Visual Studio) are good to write things fast and typically with a consistent layout. I mean, most companies are not building a videogame, and most people are still fine using things like AS/400, so...
But those files are often hard to read and merge. If WYSIWYG really worked well, why aren't more big projects or popular frameworks using it? Why do you think it's become less popular over time?
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I tried FlutterFlow but found I actually preferred writing everything in code. Also LLMs are great for writing Flutter layouts.