cimgui VS refterm

I would recommend C bindings for the Dear ImGui (https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui)

For GUI, there are lots, most well-known of course being Dear Imgui, for which people have made auto-generated C bindings. Another mature but a lot simpler option is Nuklear, as others have mentioned. Even more minimalistic (it's just 1KLOC) is microui. There are a lot more, just google "imgui library c".

DearIMGUI has both an unofficial C wrapper and a new official C binding generator. I have personally used the CIMGUI wrapper with C99 apps using the Direct3D11 backend and it works great. The new API is started by the DearIMGUI creator but is still adding features that are available in CIMGUI.

Unofficial C API - https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui

I would give ImGui a look, it is technically a c++ api, but there is a plain c version https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui/tree/docking_inter which is a free cross platform gui toolset

Whilst this is great. I have a (slightly dumb) question -What advantage does using these bindings give us over just using the generated C IMGUI bindings (cimgui) directly in Zig??Especially given the fact that that the latter are autogenerated from the original C++ IMGUI.

cimgui

This is worth a look: https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui

Dear ImGui is a C++ library, however a C port exists.

Explore GUI frameworks for C Here's another and another

refterm, a terminal emulator proof of concept.

> licensing it so that they couldn’t even look at it

https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/blob/main/LICENSE

It’s just GPL 2.0, what are you talking about!?

Are Microsoft employees vampires that will burn up instantly if they merely glance at GPL code or something?

This is sour grapes nonsense from Microsoft. “We don’t like your tone so we won’t even dignify your argument by considering it.”

At one point an MS employee said they would love to fix their code as suggested by Casey but he refused to even look at the YouTube video!

“I would love to hear your arguments but I refuse to listen to the sound of your voice.” is next-level dismissive.

You might also find https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm interesting.

Casey Muratori made a renderer/terminal a short while back. Might be a good reference of you intend to go that route. https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

You keep complaining that it's not a fully working terminal. Casey, on the other hand, writes here: [1]

> These features are not designed to be comprehensive, since this is only meant to be a reference renderer, not a complete terminal.

[1] https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm#feature-support

After that post they did implement a full reference implementation:

https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm/commits/main

And there is movement in getting changes into the terminal itself:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10461

For a basic example of why you would want GPU acceleration, have a look at refterm: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

Even processes that you wouldn't think would be impacted by a terminal can be hurt relaly bad by your terminal's performance: your compiler's logs, etc. The GPU rendering part merely guarantees that your terminal sticks at 60FPS (or, whatever your refresh rate is) if the processing behind is efficient.