libui
sciter
libui | sciter | |
---|---|---|
22 | 85 | |
10,631 | 2,562 | |
- | 0.0% | |
0.0 | 0.0 | |
almost 2 years ago | 12 months ago | |
C | C++ | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | - |
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libui
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Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries
You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.
We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.
Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.
Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.
Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.
Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.
So enjoy Electron I guess.
There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.
Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.
- BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
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Is there no simple GUI library for pure C?
What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Capy – Cross-platform library for making true native GUIs in Zig
Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.
If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Mathematical Patterns
For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.
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libui-ng-sys: external FFI bindings for libui-ng
libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.
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What GUI library should I start with after learning C?
libui
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Not-gtk GUI Libs/frameworks for plain C
https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng
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Ask HN: Is there any cross platform non native GUI written in C that looks good?
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):
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Usable cross-platform GUI?
Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?
sciter
- Show HN: Open Source TailwindCSS UI Components
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Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries
There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com
> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.
It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.
Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.
But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
- Bringing Back Horizontal Rules in HTML Select Elements
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.
[1] https://sciter.com
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
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Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:
https://sciter.com
- Ode to the M1
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So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)
- Windowing
-- Tabs
-- Menus
-- Painting
-- Animation
-- Text
-The compositor
-Handling input
-- Pointer input
-- Keyboard input
- Accessibility
- Internationalization and localization
- Cross-platform APIs
- The web view
- Native look and feel
On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.
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Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.
https://sciter.com/
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
nana - a modern C++ GUI library
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
ncurses - snapshots of ncurses - see http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html (no pull requests are accepted)
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL