kayak_ui VS bevy-inspector-egui

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

Bevy with https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui

These two both provide ways of expressing UI in a more HTMLish style.Kayak UI (0.9 support)Belly (0.10 support)

I agree that the state of GUI in Rust is not quite mature.

As an aside, there's https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui that seems nice, but I've not actually used it, so I can't vouch for it.

Hello! I would like to hear some suggestion and opinions from Rust community about building Wayland ecosystem in Rust based around Smithay and their Client Toolkit. I'm working with Wayland Compositors for over 2 years now (private projects) and wanted to move ahead from C++ to build modern Desktop Ecosystem and it's components (truly unique, not copies of macOS or Windows styles) like notification daemon, customizable desktop shell or powerful wallpaper daemon for any compositor which implements layershell protocol. Current idea is to create wallpaper daemon which uses WGPU to render shaders, images or gifs with comfort of high perofrmance renderer (still learning wgpu and it's slow process). For UI components I would like to use truly amazing KayakUI create which uses JSX-style syntax for designing widgets. Desktop Shell should provide plugins (most likely applied through WASM) for integrating various creates to get e.g. weather info or compositor integration etc.

With egui and some bevy related plugins you can get pretty close to a game engine editor, obviously missing a lot of things: https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui

Like /u/tarkin25 already mentioned "egui" can be integrated into bevy. Bevy Inspector Egui is a plugin that not only provides a helpful way to inspect different entities in the world, but also re-exports "egui" for use.

Firstly, Bevy has an internal crate called bevy_reflect, and it can handle most of the things you would usually use reflection for. For example, https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui exists which uses Bevy's internal reflect derive to make the values available via an egui-based UI. Changing simple values (like an f32, or a boolean) can be done at runtime, and if I remember correctly all you actually need to do is to add the plugin. Taking a look at the README https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/tree/main/crates/bevy_reflect you can "patch" types with new values, iterate over struct fields, serialize + deserialize, and generally do stuff like that.

Yeah runtime editing is definitely a weakness at this point. An editor is definitely a part of our plans though! We'll likely break ground on it early this year. In the meantime https://github.com/jakobhellermann/bevy-inspector-egui provides some nice runtime editing / inspecting / editor-like tools.

Here is the example

Bevy-inspector-egui is a most have, I think this game would not have been possible without, abuse it,

What do you miss from scriptable objects that you don't get from a class that serializes to JSON? Global access (read only access shouldn't prevent this right)? The inspector (looks like egui can help there?

There are also some super interesting experiments with hot reloading, both with code and on the fly value modification.

The one in bevy is nowhere near the requirements of a desktop application-level editor. I don't plan to involve bevy there at all. egui looks quite usable for low-level debug UI, though, especially with this crate.