lvgl VS microui

So here is the thing: The iPod Nano 7g is from 2012. I've seen many people designing custom PCBs and releasing Kickstarter projects for custom audio players[5] or game handhelds[6]. I know Rockbox (which is great, but its lacks support for Wifi and Bluetooth AFAIK and just does not compete with the UX of iPod's audio book features in my opinion) and iPod Linux. 10 years ago someone even reverse engineered the iPod Nano 6g display[3].

Although I'm not skilled enough in PCB-Design, after some research I found the Lilygo T-Display S3 Pro[4] based on ESP32 S3, which would be the size, but lacks audio and OS. There is also the Mango PI CyberPad[7], which looked interesting, but maybe is already too clunky.

Programming wise, LVGL[8] may be a good framework to develop a modern and efficient UI - at least it looks promising.

So, why is nobody interested in recreating an iPod nano like device? It should be doable with modern tech, but Phones have completely taken over the marked...

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/audiobooks/comments/14ue4un/comment/ks1sj99/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

2: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app/issues/847

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TedIzmguP0

4: https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t-display-s3-pro

5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C597AkhGtw

6: https://www.funkey-project.com/

7: https://mangopi.org/cp1m

8: https://lvgl.io/

LVGL is a graphics library used mostly for embedded UI's. Main website: https://lvgl.io/

Popular embedded UI library

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'm trying to interface SPI LCD (ILI943) with Zynq 7020 (PYNQ-Z2 board) and LVGL embedded UI libary. And considering between two approaches:

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.