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microui
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
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
- MicroUI: Tiny immediate-mode UI library
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What should I use to make GUI with SDL
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.
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ImGui or text rendering libraries
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".
- A lightweight, simple, fast, feature-filled, text editor written in C, and Lua
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Nuklear – A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
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
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I made a shortlist of good libraries for my GUI C project and I want your thoughts and comments.
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
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I haven't been using Linux that much yet, but because of my experience with Xfce, and because others don't seem to enjoy desktop environments on Linux too much, I want to create my own.
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.
- Best way to write a cross-platform graphical program in C while using only bare minimum third-party libraries?
- resources for making a gui library
SDL
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12to11 – run Wayland applications on an X server
Wayland works well on the Steam Deck because Valve controls the whole system. Because they have their own Wayland compositor (Gamescope), they're able to implement protocols to work around issues in Wayland without being delayed by the bureaucratic process of getting them approved. Here's an SDL pull request where a graphics developer at Valve discusses how two protocols necessary for good GPU performance haven't been added to Wayland yet so Valve added equivalent protocols to Gamescope as a workaround: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345
One thing to note is that the Steam Deck only uses Wayland for its fullscreen gaming mode. When you exit to its desktop mode (meant for running non-Steam software), it switches to X11.
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C-Macs – a pure C macOS application
The linked project doesn't use any ObjC files at all. SDL2 has a bunch of Cocoa files[1] so you did use Cocoa even if unknowingly.
[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/src/video/cocoa
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Revert "video: Prefer Wayland over X11 (take 2)"
Correct. It's explained here:
https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...
XWayland has special hooks into the compositors that normal wayland clients don't get.
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Semantic Patching in C with Coccinelle
Found about this through the release of SDL 3: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/build-scripts/SD...
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reflect-cpp - Now with compile time extraction of field names from structs and enums using C++-20.
https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_events.h
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BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?
I think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:
https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...
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Games! How they write code for SDL (+ interview with the creator)
We use the code examples throughout the article. The ellipsis characters "...." in the code were added by the author of the article. You can find the source files on the official GitHub of libsdl. In addition, each fragment has a reference to a specific area in the code. By the time this article is published, many errors will have already been fixed thanks to the issues we opened (for example, here and there). However, the links in the examples point exactly to the code you see in this article. Not only do we enjoy teasing developers but we also like making their projects a little bit better!
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Regarding including external libraries and prefix folders.
FetchContent_Declare(SDL2 GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git GIT_TAG release-2.28.3 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(SDL2)
- SDL3 Filesystem API RFC
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Chip8 emulator
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.
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
GLFW - A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input
sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine
pixeltoaster - PixelToaster is a framebuffer library for C++
olcPixelGameEngine - The official distribution of olcPixelGameEngine, a tool used in javidx9's YouTube videos and projects
minifb - MiniFB is a small cross platform library to create a frame buffer that you can draw pixels in
DS4Windows - Like those other ds4tools, but sexier
nuklear
DualSenseSupport - Preliminar DualSense