We need your thoughts on Kirigami

Development
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I’m probably the one who maintains/contributes to the most Kirigami apps and these are my biggest issues with Kirigami (warning rant ahead)

  • a lot of questionable default which needs to be overwritten in every apps particularly for better mobile support. To give some examples: the global drawer doesn’t automatically change between modal and collapsed and this requires a lot of custom codes. The toolbar also always requires some custom configuration and here is that I have to put on every of my apps src/content/ui/Main.qml · master · Network / Tokodon · GitLab

  • a lot of APIs are quite inflexible due to the amount of magic. Global drawer for example only allows to provides Kirigami.Action, which means that it is impossible to add custom content to an entry (e.g. unread count). I generally avoid hlobal drawer completely in my apps unless it’s using isMenu: true which tranform the drawer in a hamburger menu.

  • a lot of design decision seems very stuck in the past. Kirigami tries to mimick QtWidgets style but that also didn’t change much in 10 years. For example, the typography is very basic. Even Bootstrap which tries to be very neutral in term of design provides both heading and display headings. Typography · Bootstrap v5.3 and it’s not only the typography. It’s aspacing, colors, animation, and layouting. I’m really jealous of the gorgeous look of some GNOME apps https://cdn.masto.host/floss/cache/media_attachments/files/111/246/362/971/454/938/original/4a2f660815d08e5b.png . I know some people don’t want to chase the latest trend and we shouldn’t. But at the same time we should recognize that design is evolving and it’s not something that is done but that instead that there is constantly new research in this area with a lot of positive changes.

  • the documentation is not great and the tutorial is in a dear need of an update and mention all the new kirigami addons utils. This is mainly my fault and I need to find time to do it.

  • Most of the main Kirigami developers don’t actually maintains apps but focus on Plasma. Which mainly means that they are less in direct contact with the app users and don’t necessarily understand the pain of some apps. A good example for that, was the amount of time and energy it took to remove the automatic floating buttons on Plasma Mobile which was the number one complain by the app developers and users on every thread about Plasma Mobile on social media. And it still took years to remove them.

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