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mono
xwt
C#2012–2017
mono / xwt · Archived

xwt

A cross-platform UI toolkit for creating desktop applications with .NET and Mono

Mobile & Desktop
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A cross-platform UI toolkit for creating desktop applications with .NET and Mono

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-02-09 05:58:40 UTC to 2017-11-03 12:17:05 UTC.

01232012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

11 sources
manilafolder·Nov 3, 2017
Regarding native cross-platform UI frameworks, isn't this what Xwt is supposed to be (https://github.com/mono/xwt)? There's no XAML non-sense and it's an object-oriented approach to building your UI, similar to Windows.Forms. The primary benefit to it over something browser-based is start-up time. Since it's ultimately using native assemblies and there's no web server that needs to be spun up causing start-time lag. Is anyone using Xwt? The NuGet packages for it are up-to-date (but don't have very many downloads), and the official forum for it seems very dead.
In Electron.Net: Build cross platform desktop apps using .NET core and ASP.NET core
nikcub·May 21, 2016
It is only a matter of time before the end of Windows only for those apps - the new Microsoft under Nadella is operating system agnostic. Losing out in the mobile space forced the abandonment of "devices and services" and vertical integration to a horizontal "platform first" strategy, but it was always going to happen (and many pundits wanted Microsoft to anticipate it rather than react to it). The kernel doesn't matter - developers can and will target runtimes not operating systems. Today we're in a situation that would have been infeasible a few years ago: Microsoft producing apps for iOS. The strategy here is all about blocking competitive software from establishing itself against Office (the real cash-cow) and thus Microsoft services (a potential cash-cow) while the runtime is developed and rolled out across all systems. What used to
Read the rest
be vNext is now .NET Core and it is brilliant. It is largely open source[0], builds on open source tools and the runtime is small, fast and portable. VS Code is an example of this new strategy: if Microsoft can make VS[1] and their developer toolchain (which has always been the best environment, imo) cross-platform then any app can be made cross-platform (this is working, at least in my case - I was never a .NET developer until .NET Core). The advantage Windows will hold is DirectX and WPF - but for everyone else there is xwt[2] and coincidently (or not) Microsoft just bought Xamarin who wrote their cross-platform Studio product in xwt. In the interim developers can use the existing cross-platform GUI toolkit: html. Bind to a local port and open the browser and point it to http://localhost:random_port (I just happen to install Sonarr[3] this morning which does this, it means you can distribute cross-platform binaries) or write a thin platform-specific frontend. [0] https://dotnet.github.io/ [1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx [2] https://github.com/mono/xwt [3] https://sonarr.tv/
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