lvgl VS imgui

If you need something written in C and very tiny, I recommend LVGL https://lvgl.io/

The factory code uses the Lvgl graphic library. https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl

I haven’t used these personally myself, but have a look at using LVGL with Squareline. I used photoshop for designing layouts for my (simple) screens in the past and the only issues I’ve had regarding replicating my designs iirc was with text (as you mentioned) and rounded corners.

At one point u/fvanroie published this work to bring lvgl into esphome. Not sure where that stands today, but it'd be a huge improvement in functionality.

Have you considered https://lvgl.io ?

ImGUI is great, but i wouldn't call it "versatile", it's too rigid to be versatile

It's too focused on desktop (mouse/kb), and you can't really theme it other than its colors and shape of the edges

Creating custom controls is a ton of work

Then you have libraries like this: https://lvgl.io/ (gh: https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl)

That's what i call a versatile GUI library

There are also misc bugfixes, editor changes this time. But I'm a bit tired of win32 and plan to port Dear Imgui afterward. Or leave a comment if you have a good idea about the GUI! I'd like to be focus on the runtime rendering more and keep GUI programming as simple as possible.

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.

It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.

UI ImgUI can be used in with SDL and SFML

Even the GUI is not theirs, but it's not credited. It's Dear ImGui.

There's Dear ImGui

I think that Imgui would qualify as declarative. It is pretty much the industry standard for "simple GUI" at this point. It might be simple but it is powerful. People have built entire game engine editors using it.

When it comes to writing GUIs, I'm a big fan of Dear Imgui. It's not going to be the best tool for every job, but it's fairly easy to work with and it doesn't go about overcomplicating things.

Also here, what appeared to be a bug in ImGuis clipboard handling turned out to be a crypto stealer

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/4029

I would say that the distinction between TUI and GUI - outside "how would I use this tool remotely" - is mainly one for the developer. Take ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, an immediate mode GUI library) for example - the examples are much closer to TUI interfaces than a Swift UI app - the only difference between that an a terminal UI would be that the lines are thinner and that text has non-uniform spacing.

Does that make ImGui a TUI? Or make TUIs a GUI? Why are those thin visual lines graphical, if the slightly thicker visual lines drawn by your graphical terminal emulator with support arbitrary color precision and inline image rendition is not?

Maybe the issue is that it there is a terminal emulator to visualize the representation. But if an application that is not graphically heavy and needs an intermediary is a TUI, does that make most utility electron apps TUIs?

The difference between a TUI and a GUI is just an implementation detail, and these do not matter in the distinction of desktop app or not. Heck, some modern terminal UIs are more graphically appealing than some GUI apps.

> The established definition of desktop, mobile, gui, tui and commandline is pretty consistent for some decades now I would say.

Considering that all good desktop apps were TUI apps 3 decades ago, that mobile apps are in their modern form has basically only existed for 1.5 decades, and that running mobile apps as desktop apps and the general merge between the disciplines is only a few years old at most, I'd say that this statement doesn't quite hold.