Lazarus has been around for years, but people don't know about it.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

"What is Lazarus? Lazarus is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you create visual (GUI) and non-visual Object Pascal programs, and uses the Free Pascal compiler to generate your executable. Its aim is write once, compile anywhere: you should be able to just recompile your program source code with Lazarus running on another operating system (or a cross compiler) and get a program that runs on that operating system."

Have a look at Gambas3 [1] it kind of continued where Vb6 stopped. It's super useful for quick GUI based software.

[1] https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html#

Gambas is Linux (and presumably Unix) only, right? A VB6 substitute that does not run on Windows seems very niche.

Even a tool like Frontpage was a game changer.

Simple website in a minute without any need to know HTML.

No free tool that does that today. Dreamweaver does, but it's paid.

There are too many to count. WordPress, MediaWiki (on Fandom or Miraheze if you want), Mastodon, Blogger (you can still sign up apparently), Twitter, Linktree, Facebook, Google Docs, Google Drive, GitHub Gists in Markdown, ...

I went to a restaurant last night that had QR codes instead of a menu. The QR code took you to their Linktree, which linked to some PDFs on Google Drive. You could criticize that for looking unprofessional, but it sure looked better than a Frontpage site.

The other day I went looking for information on a neighborhood business that's a bit cagey about saying what they do. Their website (built by a consultancy that charges US$450, according to the Wayback Machine) seems to have been online from 02013 to 02018, but they have active pages on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which apparently is good enough for them. (It turns out to be a school for mentally disabled teenagers, if I've interpreted the multiple layers of euphemisms correctly.)

So the niche of "build a web page for free without learning HTML" where Frontpage and GeoCities followed NaviPress is not just not dead; it's thriving.

Not sure what you mean by “no free tool does that today”, there are plenty of free site builders out there, both on the web and desktop apps. Even more if you consider “freemium” site builders.

That's how I learned HTML, building the page in Frontpage and then looking at the markup. I don't remember it being free though.

It was very easy to get from the usual “alternative” software sources.

It was, but it created some nightmare HTML that even FrontPage had trouble rendering.

We called it Don’tPage.

MS Word / LibreOffice Writer → Save as… → HTML :-)

The Delphi ecosystem was similarly good back in the day. Today, the Lazarus IDE is considered as a spiritual successor to it, and it indeed has all the bells and whistles, drag and drop a UI quickly together, build a standalone EXE in a single click (not a single DLL dependency - not counting win32), just a wonderful experience.

Windows still has Windows Forms with C#. Download Visual Studio Community edition for free (not VSCode), create a new forms project, and you'll have a GUI in minutes. Even beats VB6 in areas like automatic resizing because it has better docking support. It'll only target Microsoft's proprietary .NET but because Mono has supported that forever, you can run those applications anywhere Mono exists.

There are also tools like Gambas and Gnome Builder that'll let you drag and drop UI components, but I find the software designed to run on Linux kind of lacking in comparison.

We've forgotten how to do it - the idea of dragging a button offends our modern sensibilities. You can't just drag a button, what about the layout?! What about responsive design, how will it look on a 300x200 screen and a 8k one? What about scaling? Reactivity?

Yes, and most of these problems can be very well mitigated by just implementing some sort of a layout constraint system. Xcode does it (AutoLayout), however, it's not nearly as pleasant and straightforward to use as the old VB form designer.

Visual Studio's form editor had decent solutions for that. And most application developers don't care about tiny or huge screens anyway, applications will just be broken if you resize them too much. The software stack they're using should allow them to make the design work on any form factor and resolution, but most of the time nobody cares about those edge cases.

And even then, UI designers worked on abstract units and changing screen density changed the size of the elements (if you used bitmaps you would suffer, but that would be on you). VB6 paid for my first apartment in Brazil.

You can use Cambalache [1] to create GTK4 based GUIs (comparable to Glade for older versions of GTK).

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/cambalache

First language I've learned. I remember the visual window editor was something so special, I didn't have to code the windows which was good because English was basically Chinese to my eyes at that age.

Have you used it? Did you like it? How did it compare to vb6?

It's pretty good. Lots of walls to bump against but very active community. I do lots of HMI stuff / interact with MCUs over serial.

QtCreator has a WYSIWYG editor