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).
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 a main editing canvas and a few floating toolboxes
IntelliJ lets you detach separate windows for almost all of the minor panes.
Click on the 3 dots on the top bar, View Mode, Window. It works for example for the file tree, Runners pane, Terminals etc. And it's easy to "dock" them again (an icon shows up in the window to do that) so you can try it easily.
I always keep some stuff like diffs, for example, in separate windows, it just makes me less confused about what's "temporary buffers" (as you would say in emacs) VS "actual files".
Also check out BlueJ https://www.bluej.org/. It's a simple IDE targeted for students learning Java.
BlueJ is Zen-simple but surprisingly usable for real work. If I could have only one IDE and had to choose between minimal and bloated, I'd pick minimal every time.
I learned VB .net when it first came out back in 2003 (might have been earlier). VB was quite widely used back then and now days it's declined in popularity a lot. I checked the repo insights and it's a single person who's built this and has been maintaining it. Their contribution and dedication is definitely commendable even though the language isn't popular these and even more so on Linux! This is pure selfless programming!
Seeing as how it's written in VB.Net, and 3 more of his 5 total public projects are also VB.Net, I don't think "selfless" really fits; I'll bet this project very much scratches this man's own itch.
Dedicated for sure though, and commendable, especially since it's FOSS.
A lightweight, professional VB.NET IDE built with GTK# 3 on Linux using .NET 8.0. SimpleIDE provides a modern development environment specifically designed for VB.NET projects on Linux systems.
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?
I will be trying this later this week and can report back, if you like.
That this popped up on HN is fortunate, and oddly specific to my needs. I'm in a position where I have to support some legacy .NET software for the manufacturers we service and prefer working in Linux when and if possible, so this IDE seems targeted to me. Looking forward to giving it a shot and seeing if it replaces VSCodium in my routine.
Personally I love the web-tooling, they've abused the dynamicism of JS/TS for the benfit of developer experience to the point where others tools often feels cramping when wanting to do something really quickly.
And webviews are simple to start within some host language, I have my own mini-webview-host written in .NET that provides functions for file IO, file-selection dialogs,etc.
Outside of that, more serious seemingly still viable non-lowlevel (QT/GTK) non-web cross-platform options:
- Dart/flutter seems very popular, it's a new language to learn for most but seems to have been given the chance to mature and seems to be gaining.
- in the .NET world Avalonia (desktop focused, inheris a lot from WPF architecturally and has a paid crossplatform WPF shim)
- Also .NET, MAUI (better for more "mobile" like/focused designs).
- If you're doing games and are already rendering polygons, IMGui seems to be the go-to option.
- Lazarus (Pascal) seems to still carry the old VB/Delphi torch.
That said, what I'd love to see pesonally is for library developers to start looking at sane/fast ways to develop UI applications with modern language features to have non-insane state management. Either as thin shims over the existing lowlevel libraries or as first-class support.
C++ and Java has evolved a lot just in the past 10 years, as have some other languages.
But the web-focus seems to have left desktop UI development in a rut outside of new players for new languages.
If it doesn't have to be VB.NET, then JetBrains Rider (free for non-commercial development) + C# + Avalonia as the GUI framework will bring you the closest to your "best" way.
If it does, this SimpleIDE might be an option but also it might be so that the only good option would be Visual Studio... which requires Windows. But switching to it will give you two more options - WinForms and WPF - both are old but tested GUI frameworks.
> 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.
Have you considered Lazarus? I use it with plain C for the logic (not C++).
Oh, thanks for the pointer. I've seen it before but never used it. Can it compile a Windows exe file on my Linux system?
Edit: I can't seem to find a clear mention of cross-compilation on the lazarus website, and a web search points me to several free pascal wikis. On the Lazarus IDE website it mostly mentions that Lazarus IDE itself can run on both Windows and Linux. Ideally I'd do everything on Linux and ship an exe to Windows, but this seems to be very hard to do nowadays.
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.
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.
As a person who is still quite bummed that he compleatly missed VisualBASIC for various reasons, and is even more disappointed that Livecode rug-pulled their opensource version, and has never found a GUI development system for Python which feels comfortable, this rings true.
Still working to finish up my current project (essentially text-based 3D modeling using (Open)PythonSCAD), and suffering analysis-paralysis for the successor to it (a scriptable drawing program which integrates with it), but hopefully something obvious will present itself for cross-platform opensource graphical app development.
Outside Windows, the best alternative was REALbasic, nowadays known as Xojo (https://www.xojo.com).
If you're talking about Pascal dialects, that might be the option. Delphi can cross-compile, but the editor itself is Windows only.
Althought there is RemObjects as well, they used to be responsible for Delphi for .NET, and the product eventually became Hydra, after they ended their relationship with Embarcadero/Codegear.
Lazarus w/ ObjectPascal is the front-runner (actually bought a book on it) --- RemObjects Hydra w/ the Elements compiler looks interesting, but is a bit out of my price range.
In the beginning, many VB devs were irritated, because VB.NET 1.0 was mostly C# with VB syntax, however eventually Microsoft added back many of the previous capabilities, like the Me object, REPL, and so on.
However nowadays the language is considered done, and they are only updating it to keep up with specific .NET features for interop with C#.
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.
Still using COBOL too. I know of a system that has both! Once it works reliably most businesses want to treat code like plumbing - don't touch it until it's broken.
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?
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.
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.
I actually had Claude do a lot of research into libraries. We tried a LOT of them before finding Gtk# 3 stable enough on the version used. What also was a factor was finding a version of dotnet on Linux that was stable for this combination. And it wasn't so much what would compile together, it was more what packages were available for MX Linux (my preferred flavor).
Gtk 3 has a weird way of doing scrolled controls that I couldn't accept because the nesting caused all kinds if issues. Also, the Gtk text control is incredibly slow when the file in it grows past 600 lines.
I wrote the editor control with an architectural design I created originally back in 2004, and subsequently lost. Much, much faster implementation. Took about 3 weeks with Claude.
Also wrote a treeview, listbox, colorpicker. Those took a day or two each with Claude. I will be releasing those controls in a dotnet library when I am finished with SimpleIDE.
I didn’t realize that VS Code didn’t have any VB support.
I think it’s cool you built this. While I don’t think I will personally use this as all I do is more infrastructure stuff now, this still seems like a pretty project and I wish you all the best.
The WinForms designer (drag-n-drop GUI) isn't fully supported on Linux - SimpleIDE likely focuses on code editing rather than visual design, as the .NET MAUI/WinForms designers remain Windows-centric despite .NET's cross-platform capabilities.
For me it was VB 6, then Borland Delphi, then C#. I also found a cool app that was written for .NET Framework before I started with C#: the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. To this day I'm using my own custom-defined keyboard layout and I couldn't live without it.
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 a main editing canvas and a few floating toolboxes
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]
IntelliJ lets you detach separate windows for almost all of the minor panes.
Click on the 3 dots on the top bar, View Mode, Window. It works for example for the file tree, Runners pane, Terminals etc. And it's easy to "dock" them again (an icon shows up in the window to do that) so you can try it easily.
I always keep some stuff like diffs, for example, in separate windows, it just makes me less confused about what's "temporary buffers" (as you would say in emacs) VS "actual files".
Also check out BlueJ https://www.bluej.org/. It's a simple IDE targeted for students learning Java.
BlueJ is Zen-simple but surprisingly usable for real work. If I could have only one IDE and had to choose between minimal and bloated, I'd pick minimal every time.
That's a blast from the past - We used BlueJ in high school ~20 years ago!
I learned VB .net when it first came out back in 2003 (might have been earlier). VB was quite widely used back then and now days it's declined in popularity a lot. I checked the repo insights and it's a single person who's built this and has been maintaining it. Their contribution and dedication is definitely commendable even though the language isn't popular these and even more so on Linux! This is pure selfless programming!
Haha, I laughed when you said this. I've only been writing it for a little over two months now. But thank you!
Seeing as how it's written in VB.Net, and 3 more of his 5 total public projects are also VB.Net, I don't think "selfless" really fits; I'll bet this project very much scratches this man's own itch.
Dedicated for sure though, and commendable, especially since it's FOSS.
A lightweight, professional VB.NET IDE built with GTK# 3 on Linux using .NET 8.0. SimpleIDE provides a modern development environment specifically designed for VB.NET projects on Linux systems.
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?
I will be trying this later this week and can report back, if you like.
That this popped up on HN is fortunate, and oddly specific to my needs. I'm in a position where I have to support some legacy .NET software for the manufacturers we service and prefer working in Linux when and if possible, so this IDE seems targeted to me. Looking forward to giving it a shot and seeing if it replaces VSCodium in my routine.
Its still quite rough around the edges. I would not recommend it for production at this time.
That would be nice, thank you very much.
Personally I love the web-tooling, they've abused the dynamicism of JS/TS for the benfit of developer experience to the point where others tools often feels cramping when wanting to do something really quickly.
And webviews are simple to start within some host language, I have my own mini-webview-host written in .NET that provides functions for file IO, file-selection dialogs,etc.
Outside of that, more serious seemingly still viable non-lowlevel (QT/GTK) non-web cross-platform options:
- Dart/flutter seems very popular, it's a new language to learn for most but seems to have been given the chance to mature and seems to be gaining.
- in the .NET world Avalonia (desktop focused, inheris a lot from WPF architecturally and has a paid crossplatform WPF shim)
- Also .NET, MAUI (better for more "mobile" like/focused designs).
- If you're doing games and are already rendering polygons, IMGui seems to be the go-to option.
- Lazarus (Pascal) seems to still carry the old VB/Delphi torch.
That said, what I'd love to see pesonally is for library developers to start looking at sane/fast ways to develop UI applications with modern language features to have non-insane state management. Either as thin shims over the existing lowlevel libraries or as first-class support.
C++ and Java has evolved a lot just in the past 10 years, as have some other languages.
But the web-focus seems to have left desktop UI development in a rut outside of new players for new languages.
If it doesn't have to be VB.NET, then JetBrains Rider (free for non-commercial development) + C# + Avalonia as the GUI framework will bring you the closest to your "best" way.
If it does, this SimpleIDE might be an option but also it might be so that the only good option would be Visual Studio... which requires Windows. But switching to it will give you two more options - WinForms and WPF - both are old but tested GUI frameworks.
No, I'm sorry, SimpleIDE was designed specifically for targeting Linux.
However, the guys on the Discord Visual Basic server have managed to spin it up on WSL.
https://discord.gg/Y8EH5fF6WG
> 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.
Have you considered Lazarus? I use it with plain C for the logic (not C++).
Oh, thanks for the pointer. I've seen it before but never used it. Can it compile a Windows exe file on my Linux system?
Edit: I can't seem to find a clear mention of cross-compilation on the lazarus website, and a web search points me to several free pascal wikis. On the Lazarus IDE website it mostly mentions that Lazarus IDE itself can run on both Windows and Linux. Ideally I'd do everything on Linux and ship an exe to Windows, but this seems to be very hard to do nowadays.
First search result: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Cross_compiling_for_Windows_unde...
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.
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.
>Python still isn't where BASIC was in the 1990's.
As a person who is still quite bummed that he compleatly missed VisualBASIC for various reasons, and is even more disappointed that Livecode rug-pulled their opensource version, and has never found a GUI development system for Python which feels comfortable, this rings true.
Still working to finish up my current project (essentially text-based 3D modeling using (Open)PythonSCAD), and suffering analysis-paralysis for the successor to it (a scriptable drawing program which integrates with it), but hopefully something obvious will present itself for cross-platform opensource graphical app development.
No drag-and-drop GUI builder :( I miss VB6 so much
You can have it on VB.NET with Forms, though.
If you're running Windows?
I'd love to see a cross-platform GUI toolkit w/ drag-drop and nice code integration --- currently considering Lazarus/ObjectPascal....
Yes, VB 6 is also Windows only.
Outside Windows, the best alternative was REALbasic, nowadays known as Xojo (https://www.xojo.com).
If you're talking about Pascal dialects, that might be the option. Delphi can cross-compile, but the editor itself is Windows only.
Althought there is RemObjects as well, they used to be responsible for Delphi for .NET, and the product eventually became Hydra, after they ended their relationship with Embarcadero/Codegear.
Lazarus w/ ObjectPascal is the front-runner (actually bought a book on it) --- RemObjects Hydra w/ the Elements compiler looks interesting, but is a bit out of my price range.
Never tried it, does VB.NET give the same instant familiarity allowing you to whip up tiny GUI apps quickly and without hassle?
Yes, with Windows Forms.
In the beginning, many VB devs were irritated, because VB.NET 1.0 was mostly C# with VB syntax, however eventually Microsoft added back many of the previous capabilities, like the Me object, REPL, and so on.
However nowadays the language is considered done, and they are only updating it to keep up with specific .NET features for interop with C#.
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.
I truly don’t mean this as an insult, but it always catches me off guard that people are still using VB in 2025.
Still using COBOL too. I know of a system that has both! Once it works reliably most businesses want to treat code like plumbing - don't touch it until it's broken.
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?
I am curious, what do you have in mind? For me AI is just doing busywork.
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.
I actually had Claude do a lot of research into libraries. We tried a LOT of them before finding Gtk# 3 stable enough on the version used. What also was a factor was finding a version of dotnet on Linux that was stable for this combination. And it wasn't so much what would compile together, it was more what packages were available for MX Linux (my preferred flavor).
Gtk 3 has a weird way of doing scrolled controls that I couldn't accept because the nesting caused all kinds if issues. Also, the Gtk text control is incredibly slow when the file in it grows past 600 lines.
I wrote the editor control with an architectural design I created originally back in 2004, and subsequently lost. Much, much faster implementation. Took about 3 weeks with Claude.
Also wrote a treeview, listbox, colorpicker. Those took a day or two each with Claude. I will be releasing those controls in a dotnet library when I am finished with SimpleIDE.
This isn't meant to be a passive aggressive dig, but a genuine question...why make an VB.NET IDE?
I think it's cool that you did it, it's just not a language that I've seen get a lot of love.
VB.NET's verbose syntax actually makes it PERFECT for AI assistance. And it is being developed with full AI integration.
And, Linux lacks any such tools. Not even VS Code has a plugin for VB.
I didn’t realize that VS Code didn’t have any VB support.
I think it’s cool you built this. While I don’t think I will personally use this as all I do is more infrastructure stuff now, this still seems like a pretty project and I wish you all the best.
The WinForms designer (drag-n-drop GUI) isn't fully supported on Linux - SimpleIDE likely focuses on code editing rather than visual design, as the .NET MAUI/WinForms designers remain Windows-centric despite .NET's cross-platform capabilities.
I would be very interested in a port of the .NET MAUI designer to Linux.
Well, that would certainly be a stretch goal. Right now its all code.
Absolutely love this! I learned programming with VB.NET and it still holds a special place in my heart.
Yep. BASIC, then VB 6, then VB.NET because I randomly found a cool looking app that turned out to be written for .NET Framework 1.1.
Wait, who is cutting onions?
For me it was VB 6, then Borland Delphi, then C#. I also found a cool app that was written for .NET Framework before I started with C#: the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. To this day I'm using my own custom-defined keyboard layout and I couldn't live without it.
If this i VB based, we need a Clippy addon!
Looking into it! :D
Ha, found: https://github.com/tanathos/ClippyVS
The screenshot links are 404ing for me here.
Updated. Thx.