Ask HN: Help me pick a front-end framework

Hopefully this can be a fruitful discussion since I think I have a quite clear but also reasonably common set of needs. I have a feeling that if you're "in the world" of frontend engineering you get a much more intuitive feeling for these tooling questions than I can get at a distance by reading SEO-spam developer blogs and State Of JS (although the latter does seem really helpful).

I'm thinking of building a text-annotation based app _alone in my spare time_. The core usage loop is about viewing and interacting with "visual markup" applied to a body of text. So lots of tooltips/hoverbars I guess.

Some notes about my needs:

- This would be by far the most complex GUI I've ever built.

- Relatedly, I expect to get the UX design horribly horribly wrong and start from scratch at least once.

- I also suck at making things look pretty and also don't find this problem very rewardinging to think or read about.

- All of the above point towards a framework that is pretty easy to get started in and prototype quickly.

- Because of limited time, and low confidence in UX design decisions, I would often follow the path of least resistance and the end product would be heavily influenced by the tools I used to build it.

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- Despite what I said about quick rampup I'm fine with learning new languages.

- Weak typing is a deal-breaker. If using JS, must have good TypeScript integration or similar. (Does anyone still write plain JS?)

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- I don't think I'll want a native desktop app but an iOS/Android version could make sense. But I'll never have time if this can't share most of the code with the web version.

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- I don't really have the discipline for manual testing. Luckily I also find it satisfying to over-invest in test automation. I don't really know how this is done in frontend land but good tooling would be a big plus.

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- I'm happy to sacrifice one or more of the other requirements in favour of tools that are likely to be maintained 10 years from now.

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What are HNs thoughts?

They are all a waste of time.

Web text editing is broken in mobile no? I would at first thinking on builing on prosemirror but it works imperfectly on mobile so I would choose native instead

React with MUI is probably the "safe" choice right now. Getting good performance out of React when you have a lot of things updating in real time can be tricky but it sounds like you probably wouldn't run into that right away in an app like this.

I love Mithril (https://mithril.js.org), even in 2022. I wrote a blog about how/why I used it for Homechart:

https://homechart.app/blog/tech-stack-ui/