med VS libui-ng

Here's another one with a very small footprint:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

It's the one I use every day. The executable on Windows is a little over a meg. It also works on Linux and Mac.

I fixed my editor so that it recognizes URLs, and underlines them. Clicking on one brings up a browser on that site. I should have done that 20 years ago.

No special syntax is required. It just works. I've since been adding URLs in comments all over my code, for references. It's marvelous.

It could be extended to recognize filename.jpg and filename.mp3 to display or play those files, too. Again with no special syntax whatsoever. It just works.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and Unicode.

D version:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

C version:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/me

The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension language.

I like microEmacs a lot because I can use it remotely over a tty interface.

Doing one yourself is fun. MicroEmacs drifted around NNTP in the 80s, and I snagged a copy and began modifying it to taste. I've been using it ever since. The latest version was ported to D:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

It's a very easy editor to understand and extend.

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/