egui VS egui

Anyone who's interested in the AccessKit integration can play with my work-in-progress branch: https://github.com/mwcampbell/egui/tree/accesskit

It's currently Windows-only, and I'm working on the big missing feature, which is text editing support.

> A core premise of Cocoa, and MVC in general, is that UIs are a projection of data into a different form of data, specifically bits on a screen.

This is a tangent, but the implicit assumption that the UI is visual is just begging for a response from an accessibility perspective, so here goes.

Accessibility is very much an afterthought in native GUIs, not only in Cocoa, but also in Windows with the UI Automation API, and AFAIK with other native accessibility APIs as well. With these APIs, the assistive technology (e.g. screen reader) pulls information from the application (usually via the GUI toolkit), through repeated calls to methods defined by the accessibility API. Often the AT has to do several such calls in a row (and those often translate to multiple IPC round trips, making things slow). And the UI might change between such calls; there's no guaranteed way to get a consistent snapshot of the whole thing, as there is with a visual frame. On the application/toolkit side, these methods may return different responses from one call to the next, and the application or toolkit has to fire the right events when things change.

The web improves on this, in that accessibility information is conveyed through HTML tags and attributes. And yes, this is included in the output of a React component's render function. So while in practice, implementing accessibility may still be an afterthought, it's not an architectural afterthought as it is in native platforms.

One of my goals in AccessKit [1] is to work around this shortcoming of native accessibility APIs, particularly for developers of cross-platform non-web GUI toolkits. In AccessKit, the toolkit pushes a full or incremental accessibility tree update to the AccessKit platform adapter, which maintains the full tree in memory and uses that to implement the platform accessibility API. This even works for immediate-mode GUIs, as one can see in my proof-of-concept integration with the Rust egui toolkit [2].

[1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

[2]: https://github.com/mwcampbell/egui/tree/accesskit

I can also report some modest progress on my own work on accessibility of immediate-mode GUIs. I have a branch of the Rust egui library [1] that has basic accessibility on Windows using my AccessKit project [2]. I do have a long way to go to make this fully usable and ready to submit upstream, especially when taking non-Windows platforms into account.

[1]: https://github.com/mwcampbell/egui/tree/accesskit

[2]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

Probably the hardest part, if you are new to egui, is to work out how to display the widgets you want. The egui demo site is quite handy in this regard. It features the egui widgets, and has GitHub links to the Rust code used to make each widget. This will help you replicate them in your own project.

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

It totally depends on what IoT and what purpose, for example:

IIoT/PLC/industrial automation: most likely you will have to use vendors software, most if the time it’s crap, and a mix of several tech stacks like MSSQL/C#/C++

Sensors and such: depends on what are you building or using the sensors: the protocol mostly is MQTT, and if you would store it in a db postrrsql, elasticsearch, surreldb, influxdb among the most I used.

Robots/drones: on what I build, I use protobuf/grpc for performance and cross-language and direct linux socket io, and where needed websocket but mostly for any web interaction rather than the protocol itself. The tech stack for those, the embedded side is up to you or sometimes based on the sdk you are dealing with, the backend/frontend however, I used to use go/nodejs and for frontend svelte or a simple js library/framework, but recently I’m shifting and redoing everything in rust, embedded, backend and frontend (using something like egui https://github.com/emilk/egui).

When it comes to IoT, I try as much as possible to stay away from python unless you are scripting something else done in go/c++/rust, look at python as a glorified bash script, it’s useful for that or other data science work, but not in IoT.

Same goes with other tech you mentioned, it might suit one case but not another, for example, MQTT is good for sensor IoT type, but good luck controlling a drone with it, mongodb might be great to store a fleet of robots with its access credentials and such, but if you try to use it to store realtime data, it might not perform as expected, and so on.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] 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.