Build a Native Desktop GIF Search App Using NodeGui

NodeGui is an open-source library for building cross-platform, native desktop apps with Node.js. NodeGui apps can run on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Apps built with NodeGui are written using JavaScript, styled with CSS and rendered as native desktop widgets using the Qt framework.

Some of the features of NodeGui are:

• native widgets with built-in support for dark mode
• low CPU and memory footprint
• styling with CSS including complete support for Flexbox layout
• complete Node.js API support and access to all Node.js compatible npm modules
• excellent debugging support using Chrome’s DevTools
• first-class TypeScript support

NodeGui is powered by the Qt framework, which makes it CPU and memory efficient compared with other Chromium-based solutions such as Electron. This means that applications written using NodeGui do not open up a browser instance and render the UI in it. Instead, all the widgets are rendered natively.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to install NodeGui and use it to build a meme searcher that lives in the system tray and communicates with the GIPHY API.