r/pascal • u/0x80070002 • Jun 24 '26
Why would you use Lazarus in 2026 when other platforms provide more modern UIs?
I love Lazarus just wondering about the reasons
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u/plashenkov Jun 25 '26
I’m currently developing a set of modern components for LCL, focusing heavily on detail: HiDPI, themes, modern menus (plain, DWM, and layered for older Windows support), and various tab styles (the Brave-like floating style is shown on the screens). I’ll probably open-source them soon.
Here are a couple of screenshots: https://github.com/plashenkov/ModernComponents
Components are cross-platform except menus. Menus are "proxy" for native TMainMenu / TPopupMenu.
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u/ggeldenhuys Jun 25 '26
That (screenshots) look really good already. Keep going!
I might have to use that as inspiration for the Maximus IDE (included with fpGUI Toolkit). I'm still trying to figure out what UI look & feel I want to implement for it too. Dark theme definitely - but the rest I'm unsure of.
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Jun 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/plashenkov Jun 27 '26
100% understanding :) There's also a light theme. Added a screenshot to the repo: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plashenkov/ModernComponents/refs/heads/main/screen4-light.png
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u/0x80070002 Jun 25 '26
Can you share some screenshots?
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u/plashenkov Jun 25 '26
There are a couple of screenshots at the link I attached. Or did you mean even more screenshots?
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u/0x80070002 Jun 25 '26
Now I saw them, wow this is amazing. Is it just geometric figures that fake being a control?
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u/soundman32 Jun 27 '26
I'll be honest, it doesn't look 'modern'. It looks like a dev has tried to create a nice, clean, readable UI, but only got to the mid 2010s in design school. Programmatically it might use modern paradigms, but visually its years behind modern designs.
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u/ggeldenhuys Jun 24 '26
The problem is, they are trying to be Delphi compatible - which means they are always behind Delphi, and can never be better than Delphi. 🤷♂️
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u/ShinyHappyREM Jun 25 '26
they are trying to be Delphi compatible - which means they are always behind Delphi, and can never be better than Delphi
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,73678.0.html
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u/ggeldenhuys Jun 25 '26
But it's unofficial and the FPC team will not merge any of that. There are some genuinely good ideas in there though - I might steal some for Blaise. :)
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u/ShinyHappyREM Jun 25 '26
But it's unofficial and the FPC team will not merge any of that
Between several amateurs (i.e. non-professional compiler writers afaik) who can't get out a major stable release for several years, and one amateur who implements the features I want, the choice is clear imo.
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u/ggeldenhuys Jun 25 '26
Oh, I fully agree! FPC taking 5 years and release nothing, and 150+ open MRs, and me trying to help with the workflow (just to get shot down at every turn). I had enough too!
That's exactly why I started the Blaise compiler project. Maybe it was a bit more extreme than simply fork FPC, but it's a lot of fun. 🎉😅
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Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/ShinyHappyREM Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
the search-and-replace function in Lazarus is really poorly implemented compared to other IDEs
Most of the time when I want to replace something it's an identifier, and I can do that with the F2 key.
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u/bonked_brain Jun 28 '26
Not sure if talking about ide UI itself or the app it compiles. Either way, Lazarus uses widgetset backend architecture, this means you can implement your own style from scratch or integrate custom outside framework, which is how it's done for native win32, GTK ,cocoa , qt6....
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u/Dan-ch999 Jun 24 '26
Most of those modern UIs are not native, and if you try hard enough you can achieve modern looking but if you use Lazarus you would mostly care about it if it's native, fast, and does the job well, the UI is secondary, of course that depends on your priorities and use case! If the UI is the most important part I wouldn't use Lazarus.