points by drcongo 2 days ago | 0 comments
I've built a couple of desktop apps for myself recently using GPUI-kit [0] and it's been fantastic. I'm not a Rust programmer, so leaned heavily on Opus 5.5 for both, but the end result is two apps that are considerably faster than anything I could pay money for, and tailored to exactly what I need.
[–] thisismyanon2 2 days ago
[–] drcongo 2 days ago
Thanks for the extra context, definitely useful to know.
But gpui-kit is slop for clankers. The name change from gpui-component to gpui-kit was messy with lots of dangling links remaining for weeks. What little documentation exists is impenetrable Claude speak or buried in "skills.md" files. The APIs are typically incomplete in a way that a human would've never signed off on. e.g. there's no way to enumerate the backing contents of combo boxes, there are multiple tooltip APIs (but even then only buttons can get tooltips). Mac support is clearly just a checkmark that no human has ever looked at (e.g. the way in which menus are mangled). The examples are unhelpful here because, well, see the second point.
Not a bad showing for what's mostly a one man show. But that raises the second problem. Zed's largely distanced themselves from the open source version of gpui and gpui-kit has one human developer. It's a rickety foundation for a commercial app (which is likely why Discord appears to have forked gpui).