Who are you kidding?
> (with some care)
No. Even if you were to give it more care than required to rewrite the GUI natively in each major platform, you still wouldn't be close.
Look, I get it, there are plenty of applications where a bit of clunk in the GUI is beneath other things on the priority list. That's fine. But the number of java devs who think clobbering together a few native widgets means they have constructed a native experience is... disconcertingly high. There's a whole GUI world out there beyond the lowest-common-denominator, and Swing isn't even the best at that.
Your priorities might still be perfectly rational. I might even make the same decisions under the same constraints. Just... be aware of what you're trading away
At least in Electron textboxes have standard context menu and drag and drop.
It's absolutely a psyop cover for the number of webkit-in-a-box projects that don't even bother with the first step. Normalized deviance.
https://www.amazon.com/Filthy-Rich-Clients-Developing-Applic...
What I know is that since the beginning of Java and until now, on every occasion when I use for the first time some program and I am surprised that its GUI is ugly, slow and impossible to customize, then, without exception, I always discover that the GUI is written in Java.
Since around 8 years I use only 4k monitors. While on Windows I have encountered some programs which had problems on high-resolution screens, on Linux I never had any problems, except with all professional programs written in Java, which, unlike the native GUI applications, do not honor any system configurations and they do not seem aware of which is the monitor dpi, to adjust their GUI. Moreover, for some reason the programmers who write such Java programs are almost always morons who do not provide any means for changing the fonts which are used by the GUI.
Just a few months ago, I have still encountered some expensive professional programs, which used a Java GUI installer. The Java GUI installer crashed on any computer which used monitors with 10-bit color components. When investigating the problem the conclusion was that it is a well-known Java bug that had not been solved for some years and which causes such Java GUI installers to work only on low-quality monitors with 8-bit color components.
So much for the supposed benefit of Java being able to run anywhere.
Anyone remember this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuLaxbFKAcc - Totally Gridbag
As others have said, JavaFX is really pretty good. People who use JavaFX generally seem to be satisfied, it's not often I see a substantive criticism of it, but unfortunately it seems to be widely regarded as too little too late and doesn't get given a chance. The Ada of the GUI toolkit world.
Unfortunately had issues with new version breaking backwards compatibility etc. which killed it.
QT also had similar hype but never took off.
I wouldn't build a production application in WinForms, WPF and friends are much better for that. But, for quick&dirty or even moderately complex tools for experts, VS + WinForms simply has no equal. Some Python-based designers come close, but they definitely suffer when it comes to distribution.
With modern dotnet tech, Microsoft could allow us to build a (rather sizable) single, statically linked binary for any architecture, with the impressive performance of the dotnet JIT and native controls.
After working on Android designs, I've got to say, XML is fine for UI design. You need previews and visual inspectors to get an accurate idea of what you're doing, but describing what control lives where and what properties it has is a perfectly sensible use case for XML.
We'll be writing WinForms applications in the 22nd century.
I would. People who use accessibility tools that work best with native controls would as well.
That's the whole raison d'être of the (C++) wxWidgets toolkit. [0] It fully commits to using native GUI widgets, rather than impersonating them. (That is, it wraps various other toolkits.)
As others have pointed out, the other major cross-platform toolkits (Qt, GTK) also do a pretty good job.