What's the Best/Easiest Gui Library for Ruby

What's the best/easiest GUI Library for Ruby?

Ruby Shoes (by why) is intended to be a really simple GUI framework. I don't know how fully featured it is, though.

Some good code samples can be found in the tutorials.

Also, I think shoes powers hackety hack, a compelling programming learning environment for youngsters.

Is Ruby any good for GUI development?

The short answer: no (because you said cross-platform).

The long answer: cross-platform GUIs are an age-old problem. Qt, GTK, wxWindows, Java AWT, Java Swing, XUL -- they all suffer from the same problem: the resulting GUI doesn't look native on every platform. Worse still, every platform has a slightly different look and feel, so even if you were somehow able to get a toolkit that looked native on every platform, you'd have to somehow code your app to feel native on each platform.

It comes down to a decision: do you want to minimise development effort and have a GUI that doesn't look and feel quite right on each platform, or do you want to maximise the user experience? If you choose the second option, you'll need to develop a common backend and a custom UI for each platform.

ruby is not a bad choice for your common backend.

What is Ruby's default GUI framework?

Ruby uses Tk as well.

Best GUI Framework for Ruby. Not Shoes

In the end I decided to settle on Ruby-GNOME2. Seemed to have a lot of the customizable aspects I was looking at without being overly complex. Here's the link in case anyone else is considering making GUIs in Ruby.

Ruby-GNOME2

Practical GUI toolkit?

I would go with Qt. It works on all the major platforms, and it's being continually improved. You can also get started really fast.
There are bindings for Java, Ruby and Python.

Plus it's free if you're writing open source programs.

Is there a default GUI library for Ruby 2.5?

No. Historically, Ruby used to come with Tk, but now you have to install that as gem, so there is no longer a default.

Is there any crossplatform GUI for Ruby that is easy to install on Mac OS?

Ok, for now it seems that the easiest way will be to use Ruby-GNOME2. The instruction to configure ruby for OSX will be to install macports via standard .dmg installer and execute one command:

sudo -s "port selfupdate; port install ruby; gem install gtk2"

Of course installing something is not very user-friendly, but manual tinkering with 32-bit / 64-bit interpreter execution for wxRuby afraids me more. That will require either to modify end user system or to add some kind of bootstrapper into each script so it will check if executed on 64-bit macos and in such case relaunch itself in 32-bit interpreter.

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