microui
astera
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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
astera
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What is your own favorite C project?
In terms of favorite personal projects: the 2D game engine I work on Astera.
- Astera 1.0-ish Release - C99 Cross Platform 2D Game Library
- Astera 1.0-ish release - C99 Cross Platform 2D Game Library
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
gunslinger - C99, header-only framework for games and multimedia applications
sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
pns
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
pixeltoaster - PixelToaster is a framebuffer library for C++
gb - gb single-file public domain libraries for C & C++
minifb - MiniFB is a small cross platform library to create a frame buffer that you can draw pixels in
pacman.c - Simple Pacman clone written in C99.
nuklear
rotate - [WIP] static typed programming language that compiles to vm bytecode