📢 Who uses Classic.Avalonia

[BAndysc]

If you've used Classic.Avalonia in your project, feel free to share screenshots and links to your app here. Let's embrace the classic look and feel together! Even if this is just a sample demo app, share it here :)

[rabbitism]

FYI Ursa.Avalonia is a look-less UI library, we would like to adopt more themes. Classic might be the next one (not open source thou).

[ykarpeev]

I used it for a small pdf converter GUI I made.

[BAndysc]

I love it, looks like it was taken straight from 1999!

[djeikyb]

This theme is gorgeous. It's remarkable how helpful it is prototyping. With the default fluent theme, nothing looks quite right without A LOT of fiddling. It's a bit too blank canvas. Even though I'm on a mac, and the win9x theme is very out of place, there's a clear design language to follow and it's easier to get on with trying out application design.

[BAndysc]

Absolutely agree! Classic look and feel is all about productivity and clear separation of what is interactive and what is not! Thanks for your words.

[djeikyb]

Here's a tiny little app I made for me and one other person. Tryna make it easy for them to fetch commits and build and run a project even though they aren't a dev and aren't savvy with dev tooling.

[BAndysc]

I will use my thread to showcase my other app with Classic Theme :)

WoW Database Editor is an IDE for the TrinityCore MMORPG server. The default theme is a modern, Windows 11-esque style, but a classic Windows 9x theme is also available..

[hacklex]

I realized there's no free, ad-free, fully offline stand-alone simple image editor that could be used to make pixel art-style icons, on Mac. So I asked JetBrains AI Assistant to write one for me. I only made pretty GUI and fixed several logic flaws -- most of the code was already fine.

I went to great lengths though to make Paddings and Margins look well enough to almost obscure the fact that the whole thing is built on Avalonia, which traditionally had problems with text baseline alignment -- from the days when it was called perspex, till 2025 -- and changing anything at this point would mean breaking everything for everyone who carefully prepared their styles to account for every piece of text drawn a pixel or two above its natural position.

So, a simple retro image editor (so far it only has PNG support) was born.

...While building it, I realized that many peculiar issues with button contents being offset inconsistently on MouseDown for different controls (and sometimes even for exactly identical buttons -- only because one contained an Image, and the other didn't) -- are caused by the fact that ClassicBorderDecorator tries to automatically offset its content according to its BorderStyle value. This results in various buttons offsetting their content by different values (some move the content straight down, some straight to the right, and some diagonally -- and some probably fail to move it at all). I think this begs for some refactoring on the library level, not in the user code. Also, as the decorator is heavily used outside buttons and similar active elements, the whole idea does not look very good to me. Rather, I would separate the offsetting logic into a special control that has it as its sole purpose, and does nothing else. Single responsibility principle, right? The BorderDecorator decorates, the ContentOffsetter offsets its content. Way earlier, I already created an issue on the matter, but back then we failed to pinpoint its root I think, and it got closed. Would be good if we addressed it after all.

Next, I couldn't manage to select the small icon from the ICO file for the TitleBar while keeping the large icon for the system taskbar, using the standard ClassicWindow class. Had to draw the entire window on my own. An issue is of course already open.

Next, perhaps I just don't know it but is there a button-like style for radio buttons?