DevMindscape

A GNOME-Style Terminal That Opens in 35 ms, Without GTK

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was my prompt, typos and all:

analyze why kgx startup is so slow? I want instant just like old school xterm was. I want to hit super-enter and have my terminal appear instantly, so i can type without breaks. Like Super-Enter L S Enter - and I immediately see ls on the screen

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Is Cheap, If You Do the Thinking

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash built the same app as V4 Pro for $0.17 instead of $0.65. But only on the second try. The first time, with the exact prompt V4 Pro got, it cost the same, took almost twice as long, and wrote five times more code.

I Built a YouTube Shorts Clipper for $0.65

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Turning long videos into YouTube Shorts is a real business. You post a long video, and the repurposing starts: a freelancer clips the best moments by hand, or you feed it to a web tool that auto-detects highlights and exports vertical clips with captions. Either way, you pay, and you keep paying.

I Gave DeepSeek V4 Pro Vision

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You may think DeepSeek V4 Pro is not a multimodal model. It only accepts text, no images. I didn’t realize that until I watched Theo’s video ranking DeepSeek V4 Pro near the bottom, purely because it doesn’t have vision.

I Built a Lightroom Alternative for $0.40 with AI

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have too many hobbies, and one of them is photography. As an amateur photographer, my needs are boring and specific: import raw images from my camera, pick the ones that don’t suck, nudge exposure, contrast, and shadows a bit, then export JPEGs I can share. That’s it. Nothing fancy.

Why I Created Gritcode — An AI Coding IDE That Costs Pennies, Not Hundreds

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was first exposed to AI coding when ChatGPT launched a few years ago. I made a short on my channel — ChatGPT building a simple wxWidgets app — and even then it was mind-blowing. A machine writing real C++ GUI code from a plain English description. It felt like a party trick that might someday be useful.

Hardware H.264 Decoding on Fedora 43 and 44 — The Fresh-Install Recipe

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fedora doesn’t ship proprietary codecs — that includes the H.264 / H.265 paths most browsers and video apps reach for first. On a fresh Fedora 43 or 44 install you’ll see Firefox falling back to software decode, ffmpeg refusing to handle MP4s, and vainfo listing only VP8/VP9/AV1.

The fix is three commands.

Displaying 100K Rows Without Lag: wxListCtrl Virtual Mode

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Let's talk about displaying large datasets in wxWidgets. If you've ever tried adding tens of thousands of items to a wxListCtrl, you know it can get painfully slow. The control creates an internal object for every single row, regardless of whether it's visible on screen.

wxWidgets: The Friendly Gateway to Linux Desktop Development

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Someone left a comment on one of my wxWidgets videos saying they'd spent a week trying to figure out GTK and gtkmm, and after watching the video they got further in a few hours than in that entire week. This is not uncommon, and it has a lot to do with how GTK is designed.

Writing a Markdown Editor in C++ with wxWidgets and cmark

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:55:24 +0200

It’s incredible what you can achieve with modern open-source libraries. Take a code editor, for example: imagine writing code in the left pane while instantly seeing the rendered output on the right, with every change reflected in real time. No manual refreshes, no delays—just seamless, live feedback as you work.

Introduction to Textures in Modern OpenGL

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Textures are a fundamental concept in 3D graphics programming, allowing you to apply images to 3D models, making them look more realistic and detailed. In this guide, we will explore the basics of textures in OpenGL, including how to create, bind, and use them in your applications.

wxWidgets with CMake FetchContent

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

FetchContent, introduced in CMake 3.11, simplifies the process of downloading and building dependencies. It is particularly useful for integrating libraries like wxWidgets into your project. This is the modern alternative to the ExternalProject superbuild approach covered in an earlier tutorial.

Exploring Apple's Metal Framework: A Beginner's Guide

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Apple’s Metal framework has been a game-changer in the world of 3D graphics on iOS and MacOS platforms. Since its introduction in 2014 and the subsequent deprecation of OpenGL, Metal has become the go-to framework for optimized graphics on Apple devices, especially with the advent of Apple Silicon and VisionOS. In this tutorial, we’ll dive into the basics of Metal using Swift in Xcode.

Grid Sizers in wxWidgets: Basics to Advanced

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to our practical exploration of wxWidgets’ Grid Sizers. Building on our previous tutorial on layout basics, today we’re venturing into the more advanced realms of the simple Grid Sizer and the Flex Grid Sizer. Through concrete examples – a checkerboard pattern and a functional signup form – we’ll demonstrate the power and nuances of these layout tools.

How to use Built-in Dialogs in wxWidgets

Fri, 05 May 2023 11:08:00 +0000

Where wxWidgets shines as a multi-platform UI library is its consistent native look and feel across different operating systems.

Dialogs are no exception. The library offers methods and classes to display system-specific dialogs for everyday tasks, like opening a file, choosing a font, etc.

GDK Pixbuf error when running a wxWidgets app on Linux

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 11:08:00 +0000

If you encounter an error message saying “Could not load a pixbuf from icon theme” on Linux, note that it might be just a VSCode error.

As explained in my Menus video (the “Problems with Icons on Linux” chapter), this error may occur when using the default system icons, for example when using submenus and option items in the main menu.

Handling Clipboard Operations in wxWidgets Text Controls

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 11:08:00 +0000

Handling common clipboard tasks for your text fields is a must-have for any serious application that needs to accept keyboard input from the users. Surprisingly, it’s not that easy in wxWidgets, especially considering the differences between platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows).

I explain the problem in detail in my Text Fields video (the “Clipboard Operations” chapter). In the Menus tutorial, I talk about menus in general and constructing the Edit menu with the clipboard commands in particular.

Box Sizers in wxWidgets: Layout Fundamentals

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 10:58:08 +0000

Let’s talk about layout. It is a fundamental concept in any kind of UI programming, and designing desktop applications with wxWidgets is no different.

This is a companion post to the video tutorial I created some time ago. Check it out for a more detailed explanation and live demo of various sizers configurations:

wxWidgets + CMake: Multiplatform Superbuild

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 10:58:08 +0000

In this article I’ll show you how to create a native-looking UI application in C++ and build it on each of the major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS) using a single build script code.

You can download the full source code of the sample program from github: https://github.com/lszl84/wx_cmake_template . Also, check the YouTube video below, which describes the process in detail, showing how this works on each of the aforementioned platforms: