libui-ng VS microui

I remember a few years ago, a few really cool cross-platform UI libraries were starting to emerge such as libui [0] that got me excited. I've kind of lost track of them since then (libui itself went dormant for a while before this fork) so I am not sure how mature/useful they are now, but the potential for writing native desktop UIs in basically any language seemed like an absolute dream. Perhaps it's feasible for very basic things?

[0] https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

Linux/Windows/MacOS: https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

There are a few libraries for GUI (for example, capy), and you can easily use any C libraries out there with @cImport (like libui), but it is still a work in progress.

It exists, at least for simple use cases. You are looking for libui-ng. wxWidgets of course also exists, but it is less a basic native wrapper than it is a complete toolkit emulating what doesn't exist where as libui seems to be more lowest common denominator (not sure but I think there might be a small amount of emulation, but not like wx I don't think).

There's now libui-ng [1] which seems to be active and already has many wrappers

[1] https://libui-ng.github.io/libui-ng/

There is also microui, which I like[0].

Which I forked to work with SDL2[1], no guarantees. It's fun to hack on.

[0]https://github.com/rxi/microui

[1]https://github.com/kennethrapp/microui

Otherwise, https://github.com/rxi/microui is small enough that you can hack around. Look at the issue though, there's a bit of unaligned access there.

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".

The price for the 'lightest' UI toolkit probably goes to microui:

https://github.com/rxi/microui

Just around 1100 lines of C code.

You need to bring your own renderer, but that's the same for Nuklear or Dear ImGui.

I wrote a WASM wrapper for the microui demo too:

https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/sgl-microui-sapp.html

Good C library list: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/links/libs https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear + C89, no dependencies, public license. 5/5 https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/ + good tutorial and wiki guides 5/5 https://libsdl.org/ + infinite possibilities - whole library for making games, forums, wiki - complicated, not many C tutorials, need to manage game states... 4/5 https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl + good docs - for embedded systems 4/5 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui + Popular, inspired Nuklear - for C++ 3/5 https://docs.enlightenment.org/api/imlib2/html/ + very efficient, used in Conky - uses X so only for Linux, just for displaying images and text and stuff 2/5 https://github.com/rxi/microui + simple, small - you need to handle your own drawing 2/5 GTK+ - no

Really? Here's a minimal UI with I believe less LOC than Suckless DWM. It's not a full DE, but I imagine you could probably turn it into one without adding that much more code.