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It's one of those "grass is greener on the other side" situations.

I'm currently bouncing back and forth between VB6 and HTML/CSS and yeah sometimes it is nice to just quickly drag something into place, but other times I really wish I could just use a layout system like CSS Grid (or Flexbox) and give it all the items I need and let it figure out how to lay it out.

For instance, recently I had to edit some "tables" in VB6 that turned out to have been hand-drawn with pixel-perfect lines and changes were incredibly slow and I would have murdered for that to be in HTML/CSS.

Sometimes I like (and miss) the best of both worlds in XAML where it has drag-and-drop design tools, but also the copy-and-paste and handwrite support of XML, and it has modern layout tools like Grids for auto-layouts/responsive layouts.




And you can search/diff the pure text representation which is a major plus as well. I absolutely hate the workflow of constantly moving the mouse back and forth between the visual components and some gigantic property panel sitting at the edge of the window (index-finger programming). Floating windows are even worse, as they always seem to get in the way, so now also spend time on window ceremony (moving / resizing the "floaters"). In graphics tools(InkScape for instance) I almost always move objects around using the cursor keys as my mouse based positioning skills are just not accurate enough (and I know that I'm not the only one)

Anybody have good examples of tools (graphics editors for instance) that has a good alternative to that clunky property pane?


The grid system of wxWidgets also works like that.

It has drag-and-drop design tools, and copy-paste, and it can be written programmatically.

So the best of both worlds exists, and it is just not used enough.

wxWidgets has Python bindings.




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