Feature?: Direct support for Qt-Designer (*.ui) files

antis81 commented 4 days ago

Background

Few weeks ago I started wirting a little serializer fun tool that converts *.ui files into *.slint and *.qml (only latest Qt6) formats. Currently this is just for me to learn about Rust tooling. However the tool produces quite usable results in current state and I make good progress. The crate depends on quick_xml and serde to create the model(s) and yaserde for writing the output *.slint file (because quick_xml can only serialize into XML formats; not Slint).

Restrictions

Qt's custom widgets cannot be converted (and probably never will unless C++ can be reliably transpiled natively into Rust).
Connections are not supported (I think it is possible though)
Some widgets and properties cannot be converted without manual editing
probably more that I am not aware of right now

Make it a Slint feature maybe?

Assuming Slint would be able to read those Qt-Designer files (like a "JIT") and render them. Do you think this will benefit both projects Qt and Slint? I think in best case it might even make Rust more interesting for Qt/C++ developers, because it just feels like Qt and people wouldn't even have to learn a new language (when used with C++ bindings).

ogoffart commented 4 days ago

Awsome. I think this tool could be usefull to migrate dialogs or some widgets from Qt widgets to Slint.

I'm not sure it should be integrated directly into slint.

It should probably be a tool can can be run once on your files.

I guess it could be a different build-dependency so the build.rs would look like:

// (this is pseudo code, naming need to be thought out and paths need to be relative to OUT_DIR and such)
qt_ui_to_slint::conver_ui_file("foo.ui", "foo.slint");
slint_build::compile("foo.slint");

And so this wouldn't be part of Slint itself but just another crate

Another solution i'm not suggesting is if you could do

import { Foo } from "foo.ui";

but that means we need to add support into Slint and keep compatibility.

Anyway, we could have that in our repository in the tools folder. Or you could just have it in a separate repository.

antis81 commented 4 days ago

Wow… actually I didn't think about importing a component directly from a "foo.ui". No question this would be really a powerful feature. Very ambitioned though (put in a single custom widget and… :zap:). Maybe with active support from Qt/KDE. Right now it's a dream, let's keep it this way (or at least mark this highly experimental :smile_cat:)…

The project repository lives currently on GitLab -> qt-ui-conv. When moving this into tools maybe I should start thinking about splitting out features (qt_ui_conv_slint, …qml, …cli, …gui?, …).

slint-ui / slint