Agreed on the crappiness of the web stack for this application. But WPF isn't necessarily better. Case in point: a Bible study program where one's choice of video card actually mattered, at least in 2009 (see http://community.logos.com/forums/t/6200.aspx). BTW, I only know about that specific example because my brother is a preacher.

I think a better foundation for a cross-platform editor/IDE would be SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit from Eclipse, perhaps ported to .NET.

And this is why it's web stack: there are no better alternatives.

For decades of trying, this is the best we've managed to do for cross-platform UIs. It ain't great, but it soundly beats the alternatives.

I think that SWT proves that for some criteria, particularly nativeness and accessibility, it is possible to do better than the web stack while covering all major desktop platforms.

Or even IntelliJs skin and components for Swing.

Do the IntelliJ skin and components have any advantages over Eclipse's SWT in your opinion? My understanding is that Swing is much heavier. In fact, SWT was originally designed for Java 2 Micro Edition [1].

[1]: http://flylib.com/books/en/2.120.1.42/1/

Swing was crap at the time, but it got significantly better.

Cross-platform WPF did exist. It was originally called "WPF/Everywhere" but eventually branded as Silverlight.

WPF?! You cannot be serious.

WPF is, by far, the most pleasant and flexible thick client, windowing system out there. XAML is a bit verbose, but the binding capabilities combined with an open source MVVM framework like Caliburn allow you to build extremely flexible UIs.

WPF also abstracts control behavior away from presentation and allows you to easily and quickly extend the base set of controls to do whatever you want to.

After building multiple thick client applications using VB6, MFC, Swign, Winforms and WPF, WPF exceeds all of these, by far, in flexibility and maintainability.

Also <grid> (as a sane alternative to <div class="table">) where you can actually align stuff exactly the way you want.

You know about flex box right?

Microsoft should have bought Qt when they acquired Nokia. So they have an alternative for cross platform desktop development.

This makes sense , Microsoft does not support C for user space development , and Qt/C++ is good way to push C out from user space development in all platform's .

It wasn't there anymore, Nokia sold it's Qt business to Digia quite soon after the 2011 announcement of Windows Phone strategy.

I find the binding part and MVVM stuff rubbish.

For me, the real value is composition flexibility.

Ahhh we can dream... sigh