imgui VS notcurses

Compare imgui vs notcurses and see what are their differences.

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)

notcurses

blingful character graphics/TUI library. definitely not curses. (by dankamongmen)
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imgui notcurses
351 102
55,717 3,281
- -
9.7 7.6
1 day ago 16 days ago
C++ C
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

imgui

Posts with mentions or reviews of imgui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-06.
  • Using raylib with Dear ImGui: Game Dev Debugging UI
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2024
    include(cmake/CPM.cmake) function(raylib_imgui_setup_dependencies) message(STATUS "Include Dear ImGui") FetchContent_Declare( ImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/ocornut/imgui GIT_TAG 277ae93c41314ba5f4c7444f37c4319cdf07e8cf) # v1.90.4 FetchContent_MakeAvailable(ImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(ImGui SOURCE_DIR IMGUI_DIR) add_library( imgui STATIC ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_draw.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_widgets.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_tables.cpp) target_include_directories(imgui INTERFACE ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}) include(cmake/CPM.cmake) message(STATUS "Include dbg-macro") cpmaddpackage( "gh:sharkdp/dbg-macro#fb9976f410f8b29105818b20278cd0be0e853fe8" )# v0.5.1 message(STATUS "Include fmtlib") cpmaddpackage("gh:fmtlib/fmt#e69e5f977d458f2650bb346dadf2ad30c5320281" )# 10.x message(STATUS "Include raylib") cpmaddpackage("gh:raysan5/raylib#ae50bfa2cc569c0f8d5bc4315d39db64005b1b0" )# v5.0 message(STATUS "Include spdlog") cpmaddpackage("gh:gabime/spdlog#7c02e204c92545f869e2f04edaab1f19fe8b19fd" )# v1.13.0 message(STATUS "Include rlImGui") FetchContent_Declare( rlImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/raylib-extras/rlImGui GIT_TAG d765c1ef3d37cf939f88aaa272a59a2713d654c9) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(rlImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(rlImGui SOURCE_DIR RLIMGUI_DIR) add_library(rlimgui STATIC ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}/rlImgui.cpp) target_link_libraries(rlimgui PRIVATE imgui raylib) target_include_directories(rlimgui INTERFACE ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}) endfunction()
  • Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
  • Immediate Mode GUI Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    Immediate mode is a fuzzy concept, as witnessed by this writeup: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...
  • Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
  • Black Triangles
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    It's fun to see the evolution in e.g. these examples of image loading for Dear Imgui:

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Image-Loading-and-Disp...

    DirectX9 will even load the image for you, DirectX11 okay we get a few more structures to fill out, DirectX12 is where it goes off the rails and we are filling out a bunch of UNKNOWN DONT_CARE JUST_DO_IT. Then of course Vulkan is the one that gets the big fat "this probably won't actually work for you" warning.

    I understand whats happening, but you know sometimes I just want to display a fucking image.

  • Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface with minimal dependencies
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
    ImGui is engine/GPU agnostic

    Themeing isn't a just a retained mode thing, you can do wonders with immediate UIs, even thought (dear)ImGui doesn't provide much, you can still do wonders: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/707#issuecomment-362...

    More on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1qyvQsjK5Y

  • Where do I start to learn C++ for a game development
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 10 Dec 2023
    Bonus: If you want to make desktop app with UI, then this is another great C++ library and it's also simple to learn as well. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui.
  • GUI library for fast prototyping
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.
  • Stretching myself thin with Dear ImGui projects
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 Nov 2023
    They use a Dear ImGui, a C++ GUI library.
  • PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write windows positions."

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports

    This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11. Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of a weird island that nobody wants to support.

notcurses

Posts with mentions or reviews of notcurses. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-02.
  • Text UIs != Terminal UIs
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2024
    > The only reason we don't have animation frameworks for the terminal is because it's not possible

    https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

  • Notcurses: Blingful character graphics/TUI library
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2024
  • Notcurses
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Nov 2023
  • good high-level ncurses library
    5 projects | /r/commandline | 10 Jul 2023
    Notcurses. Install it and run notcurses-demo to be suitably impressed.
  • Ratatui: Build rich terminal user interfaces
    2 projects | /r/rust | 30 May 2023
    Same for me, I would be much more motivated if there was something like textual for Rust. Given the capability of terminal emulators now I think Rust is lacking behind in the TUI field. Just checkout what can be done with something like notcurses
  • Terminal emulators that break from the traditional rendering approach?
    1 project | /r/commandline | 29 May 2023
    On the application side of rendering, see notcurses, it is at the leading edge: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses
  • Doom on Teletext
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2023
    Other TUI libraries of note: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/doc/OT...
  • Io Uring
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 May 2023
    The broader world probably knows him best for the terminal handling library Notcurses[1] and a lot of telling terminal emulator authors to get their shit together.

    I’ve had his grad-school project libtorque[2] (HotPar ’10), an event-handling and scheduling library, on my to-read list for years, but I can’t seem to figure out how it accomplishes the interesting things it does.

    [1] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses, https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/

    [2] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Libtorque

  • Are We Sixel Yet
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 May 2023
    In XTerm, this (rightly) makes no difference. In Foot and Contour however, you still end up a line resp. a screen below where you started, if now with the correct horizontal position.

    So it seems to me like what you want should work by default, except it doesn’t.

    It should be possible to instead just treat the whole thing as a graphical overlay (by computing or directly asking for the character cell size, as Kirill Panov rightly admonishes me is possible with XTWINOPS) without touching the cursor; that’s what the “sixel scrolling” setting (DECSDM) is supposed to do. Then you can just manually move the cursor forward however many positions after you’re done drawing.

    Except apparently the DEC manual (the VT330/340 one above) and DEC hardware contradict each other as to which setting of DECSDM (set or reset) corresponds to which scrolling state (enabled or disabled), and XTerm has implemented it according to the manual not the VT3xx[1,2,3]—then most other emulators followed suit[4]—then XTerm switched to following the hardware[5,6] (unless you and that’s what I’m seeing on my machine right now. So now you need to check if you’re on XTerm ≥ 369 or not[7]. If I’m reading the Notcurses code right, other terminals have followed suit[8].

    Again, ouch.

    P.S. It seems DEC had an internal doc for how their terminals should operate (DEC STD 070) [9]. It does not document DECSDM at all.

    [1] https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/217#issuecomment-86449...

    [2] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues/41

    [3] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1782

    [4] https://github.com/arakiken/mlterm/pull/23

    [5] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_369

    [6] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-T...

    [7] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/commit/0918fa251e2... (the correct version cutoff is 369 not 359, the patch contains a now-fixed bug)

    [8] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/li... (look for mentions of invertsixel)

    [9] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/standards/EL-SM070-00_DEC_S...

  • smenu clean window effect
    3 projects | /r/commandline | 11 May 2023
    And there's also the notcurses library:

What are some alternatives?

When comparing imgui and notcurses you can also consider the following projects:

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

rich - Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.

nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library

FTXUI - Features: - Functional style. Inspired by [1] and React - Simple and elegant syntax (in my opinion). - Support for UTF8 and fullwidth chars (→ 测试). - No dependencies. - Cross platform. Linux/mac (main target), Windows (experimental thanks to contributors), - WebAssembly. - Keyboard & mouse navigation. Operating systems: - linux emscripten - linux gcc - linux clang - windows msvc - mac clang

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

xterm.js - A terminal for the web

GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk

sixvid - Simple script for animated GIF viewing using sixels

egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native

tcell - Tcell is an alternate terminal package, similar in some ways to termbox, but better in others.

CEGUI

awesome-tuis - List of projects that provide terminal user interfaces