Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits.

It looks and works so intuitively.

At the same time it's common to hear "how does this not support high DPI?" or "How does this app not have a dark mode, it's 2024!" etc.

Modern toolkits just do a lot of stuff that older toolkits didn't. Some times at the expense of not being as quick to get off the ground as VB was.

The original winforms implementation in the early 2000's was pretty close to VB in terms of efficiency but its warts were numerous, e.g. the DPI used in the designer view (when writing the code) affected what happens when you run it, and so on.

Dark mode would have been trivial with old toolkits because they used standardize look and feel. In fact motif lets you customize the color scheme through a text file.

Which can make each app fit the appearance of the given desktop.

Old guis also had more accssibility features.

The only thing modern ones have going for them is animation and visual customization.

Old toolkits make it much easier to set the text color of some label to #444, which looks fine on a light background, but is very hard to read on a black background. Setting it to some well-defined MutedText color requires more effort, and it requires the toolkit vendor to have thought about named colors in the first place (and if there are named colors, they might not be meaningful like Muted or Success, but instead ButtonBackground or TooltipText).