SimpleIDE • Hacker News Board

Re: SimpleIDE

#21

Post by dadoum » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 2:50 AM UTC

impendingchange wrote: post #10

tombert wrote: post #7

Interesting, I didn't actually know that VB.NET ever got ported to Linux with the rest of .NET Core. Does it still have the drag-n-drop GUI feature to make graphical apps, or is that a strictly Windows thing?

And what makes this project significant is there's a lack of VB.NET tools on Linux. It has been challenging trying to get Gtk 3 widgets to play nice. Finally just rolled my own custom-drawn editor, treeview, and listbox. Going to release them later in a library.

Wait, you're not using GtkSourceView? Cool

You could also have used Mono.TextEditor btw. I personally find it better than GtkSourceView, and for having ported it to GTK# 3 myself, it was rather straightforward to port.

Re: SimpleIDE

#22

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 3:26 AM UTC

impendingchange wrote: post #8

robertherber wrote: post #5

I did learn programming with VB many years ago. It definitely holds some sentimental value for me although I wouldn’t consider using it today.

Definitely a great deal of nostalgia for me. Years ago, I had written this project up from scratch and later lost all my source code in an accident. I learned about vibe coding two months ago and, wow, writing this with Claude has been lots of fun. Almost to the point in the project of having full AI integration in the IDE.

[deleted]

Re: SimpleIDE

#23

Post by dingnuts » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 3:55 AM UTC

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #20

armchairhacker wrote: post #19

I think development environments are an undervalued field (perhaps because people hate writing UI). Tiny open-source IDEs are a great learning tool and can be starters for research IDEs (whereas VSCode, while more practical for production IDEs, has complexity that gets in the way of experimentation). Another tiny open-source IDE (for Java) is https://github.com/bobbylight/RText

I've wanted to create an IDE which uses a multi-window design. I think most IDEs are just doing a left-drawer bottom-drawer layout where the left drawer has all your files in a tree and the bottom drawer has your terminal. I've somewhat recently taken to detaching the solution explorer from the main window in Visual Studio and I'm kind of enjoying it. It's like what used to be GIMP's original default interface, with…

Emacs lets you have as many windows as you like, and you can mix and match terminal and GUI windows all connected to the same session

Re: SimpleIDE

#24

Post by dartharva » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 4:29 AM UTC

No drag-and-drop GUI builder :( I miss VB6 so much

Re: SimpleIDE

#25

Post by north_creao » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:25 AM UTC

This looks cool, I think we will need a new generation of IDEs that are AI augumented to boost developers productivity. Cursor is just adding a code agent integrated in the VS code editor, but can we have something further with GUI?

Re: SimpleIDE

#26

Post by ivolimmen » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

After working in various BASIC programming languages and IDE's I will definitely try this one out. I can't help but compare this to GAMBAS (https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html). It's not VB.NET but it is an IDE and also a BASIC variant and solely for Linux.

Re: SimpleIDE

#27

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

Kudos for the VB love, I keep BASIC in my favourite languages bookshelf.

The later versions, being structured and AOT compiled were quite good for a dynamic language, with a beginner friendly approach that allowed to scale up to complex problems.

Python still isn't where BASIC was in the 1990's.

Re: SimpleIDE

#28

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 6:37 AM UTC

dartharva wrote: post #24

No drag-and-drop GUI builder :( I miss VB6 so much

You can have it on VB.NET with Forms, though.

Re: SimpleIDE

#29

Post by asyncze » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 6:45 AM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #23

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wanted to create an IDE which uses a multi-window design. I think most IDEs are just doing a left-drawer bottom-drawer layout where the left drawer has all your files in a tree and the bottom drawer has your terminal. I've somewhat recently taken to detaching the solution explorer from the main window in Visual Studio and I'm kind of enjoying it. It's like what used to be GIMP's original default interface, with…

Emacs lets you have as many windows as you like, and you can mix and match terminal and GUI windows all connected to the same session

[dead]

Re: SimpleIDE

#30

Post by bflesch » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 7:48 AM UTC

Sorry for the stupid question, but would this IDE be a good place to create VB.net GUI apps for Windows 11?

I've been looking into "best" ways of creating Windows GUI apps from Linux and apart from C/Cpp with native Windows APIs most options seem to focus on React Native and web technologies.

Is SimpleIDE a valid option for this? Does it spit out an .exe file that I can run on a vanilla Windows 11 installation?