schneegans

He replied already above :)

90% of Kando is not the menu itself, but the very complex WYSIWYG menu editor. For this you definitely need a framework.

But also the menu itself... I guess I could draw it using OpenGL. Proper antialiasing and font rendering will be tough, but not impossible.

Then I want transitions and animations. Have you implemented something like this before, where a user can quickly switch between various states, animations need to be aborted, restarted right in the middle and so on? It's awfully complex.

Then I want this to be themeable. Users should be able to completely define the look and feel of the menu. Themes in Kando can drastically change the way the menu looks and behaves animations wise. Why should I spend weeks or months implementing something like this from scratch even if it will never be as good as CSS?

And I haven't written about international font rendering, emojis, touch, stylus, or controller input so far. Plus you get extremely powerful debugging and performance analysis tools as part of the framework...

It all boils down to the question: Do I really want to spent months or maybe years reimplementing stuff which is already there just to save 100MB?

Well, the WYSIWYG menu editor of Kando is one if the most complex nonstandard UI elements I have written so far. That's an aweful lot more than a few buttons.

Also, there is usually no ready-made pie menu widget in native frameworks. So you will have to draw the menu yourself with low-level shapes like boxes, circles, and text. If you want these to be themeable, if you want to have a powerful animation engine, and if you want that your scene is efficiently drawn even at high resolution with several hundreds of said shapes moving around your screen, things get quickly much more complex than you may think...

And soon you will realize that CSS and modern browser engines are exactly optimized for this.

I tried using Tauri (would be very cool), but sadly they have severe performance issues on Linux which make an app like Kando impossible at the moment.

If you have both hands at your keyboard, that's 100% true. However, it really works well with workflows which rely on mouse, stylus, touch, or controller input.

Especially when used for "creative" or "artistic" tasks (e.g. painting, video editing, 3D modelling, etc.) pie menus can really have a benefit because you have your hand at the stylus or at the mouse most of the time anyways.

Over the past year, I have been developing Kando. It offers an unconventional, fast, highly efficient, and fun way of interacting with your computer!

You can use it to launch applications, simulate keyboard shortcuts, open files, and much more. It now runs on Windows, macOS and most Linux desktop environments.

I hope you enjoy Kando as much as I enjoyed developing it!