Ask HN: What's is your go to toolset for simple front end development?

I mostly use Bootstrap for prototypes. For most of my use cases, I just use card styled divs. There is basic support for different types of container divs in bootstrap. There's card-group, card-deck and even card-columns. Never had to go beyond these for my requirements. Forms are a breeze and come out looking great, right out of the box.

Bootstrap has a flex (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/utilities/flex/) for managing layout, alignment, grid sizing etc.,

Also, targeting multiple form-factors and building responsive UIs is easy once you start with the mobile-first styling classes and then start setting the various breakpoints for larger device form-factors.

If you already know HTML and some basic CSS, getting up to speed on Bootstrap or Material Design basics might be just a day or so. Their documentation is very good and you can go straight to the section you want (eg: tables) and try it out in your HTML.

Seconded on these recommendations (except Pyramid which I have not used). Vuejs just applied to certain places as needed with no build/bundle/npm packages and bootstrap and that's it.

Whatever JEE, Spring and ASP.NET support for SSR with components and vanilaJS.

For drag and drop try https://devdojo.com/tails

It's hard to know exactly what you mean by "simple", but I'm fairly sure you want to avoid any frameworks, as those tend to have a learning curve, even for the easiest ones. Same goes for build tools like Webpack, which I still have trouble with after years of use.

For CSS I see a lot of recommendations for "classless" libraries, which I've never tried, but could be good if you don't need to do much tinkering. For just a little bit more time investment you can get a lot more options with something like Bootstrap. It's pretty easy to learn, has a lot of "drag and drop" style components, and there are tons of templates out there (free and premium). I learned it once many years ago and have been using it for projects ever since.

On the interactivity side it really depends on what your needs are, but if you don't need too many bells and whistles you could probably get by with vanilla Javascript. jQuery is also a good choice for simple applications, as it offers a slightly more intuitive interface to some of the basic JS actions.

All of this being said, if you think you will be spending a lot of time on the frontend, or have complex interactivity needs, it might be worth it to learn a framework. I can recommend Vue as one that is fairly easy to get started with and also scalable to larger applications.