owl VS imgui

Compare owl vs imgui and see what are their differences.

owl

The portable Wayland compositor in Objective-C (by owl-compositor)

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)
InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
owl imgui
5 351
101 55,870
0.0% -
2.7 9.7
over 2 years ago 4 days ago
Objective-C C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 only MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

owl

Posts with mentions or reviews of owl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-03.
  • Blink virtual machine now supports running GUI programs
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2023
    Well, there is a Wayland Compositor for macOS:

    https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl

    It still lacks a lot of features though (I think, I never tried it out)

  • X Window System Basics
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2023
    > X runs on so many more platforms than Wayland [...] Python3 is strictly an improvement on every platform, I don't think they're analogous because there really is no good reason to keep Python2 around

    X runs on more platforms than Wayland because...it was ported to them. Just like things use Python 3 because they were ported to it.

    This is also understating the reach of X I think: it's widely used in the embedded world, is seeing increasing support in BSDs, and has even been used on macOS (https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl). People have even used it to embed an entire compositor inside a GTK app (https://github.com/alexlarsson/wakefield).

    That isn't to say that libwayland has a lot of Linux-isms in it, but afaik they're not really structural as much as there is lack of interest to generalize things more. Heck, the protocol-oriented architecture would even make it easier for anything Linux-esque to be removed in favor of alternative protocols.

  • Valve is Paying 100+ Open-Source Developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and More
    2 projects | /r/linux | 17 Dec 2022
    Yup, the Owl compositor implements Wayland on Quartz (the macOS graphics system).
  • Release 1.2.0 · 89luca89/distrobox
    3 projects | /r/linux | 15 Dec 2021
    Thanks! FYI there is a wayland compositor for macos too, so it would be nice to be able to use that with linux apps in a VM...
  • Owl: A WIP portable Wayland compositor written in Objective-C
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2021

imgui

Posts with mentions or reviews of imgui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-06.
  • Using raylib with Dear ImGui: Game Dev Debugging UI
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2024
    include(cmake/CPM.cmake) function(raylib_imgui_setup_dependencies) message(STATUS "Include Dear ImGui") FetchContent_Declare( ImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/ocornut/imgui GIT_TAG 277ae93c41314ba5f4c7444f37c4319cdf07e8cf) # v1.90.4 FetchContent_MakeAvailable(ImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(ImGui SOURCE_DIR IMGUI_DIR) add_library( imgui STATIC ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_draw.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_widgets.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_tables.cpp) target_include_directories(imgui INTERFACE ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}) include(cmake/CPM.cmake) message(STATUS "Include dbg-macro") cpmaddpackage( "gh:sharkdp/dbg-macro#fb9976f410f8b29105818b20278cd0be0e853fe8" )# v0.5.1 message(STATUS "Include fmtlib") cpmaddpackage("gh:fmtlib/fmt#e69e5f977d458f2650bb346dadf2ad30c5320281" )# 10.x message(STATUS "Include raylib") cpmaddpackage("gh:raysan5/raylib#ae50bfa2cc569c0f8d5bc4315d39db64005b1b0" )# v5.0 message(STATUS "Include spdlog") cpmaddpackage("gh:gabime/spdlog#7c02e204c92545f869e2f04edaab1f19fe8b19fd" )# v1.13.0 message(STATUS "Include rlImGui") FetchContent_Declare( rlImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/raylib-extras/rlImGui GIT_TAG d765c1ef3d37cf939f88aaa272a59a2713d654c9) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(rlImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(rlImGui SOURCE_DIR RLIMGUI_DIR) add_library(rlimgui STATIC ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}/rlImgui.cpp) target_link_libraries(rlimgui PRIVATE imgui raylib) target_include_directories(rlimgui INTERFACE ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}) endfunction()
  • Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
  • Immediate Mode GUI Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    Immediate mode is a fuzzy concept, as witnessed by this writeup: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...
  • Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
  • Black Triangles
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    It's fun to see the evolution in e.g. these examples of image loading for Dear Imgui:

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Image-Loading-and-Disp...

    DirectX9 will even load the image for you, DirectX11 okay we get a few more structures to fill out, DirectX12 is where it goes off the rails and we are filling out a bunch of UNKNOWN DONT_CARE JUST_DO_IT. Then of course Vulkan is the one that gets the big fat "this probably won't actually work for you" warning.

    I understand whats happening, but you know sometimes I just want to display a fucking image.

  • Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface with minimal dependencies
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
    ImGui is engine/GPU agnostic

    Themeing isn't a just a retained mode thing, you can do wonders with immediate UIs, even thought (dear)ImGui doesn't provide much, you can still do wonders: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/707#issuecomment-362...

    More on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1qyvQsjK5Y

  • Where do I start to learn C++ for a game development
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 10 Dec 2023
    Bonus: If you want to make desktop app with UI, then this is another great C++ library and it's also simple to learn as well. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui.
  • GUI library for fast prototyping
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.
  • Stretching myself thin with Dear ImGui projects
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 Nov 2023
    They use a Dear ImGui, a C++ GUI library.
  • PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write windows positions."

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports

    This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11. Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of a weird island that nobody wants to support.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing owl and imgui you can also consider the following projects:

distrobox - Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with. Mirror available at: https://gitlab.com/89luca89/distrobox

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

XQuartz - An X11 server and client libraries for macOS

nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library

xdotool - fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

blink - tiniest x86-64-linux emulator

GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk

wakefield - A proof of concept of a GTK+ Wayland compositor for various situations

egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native

xserver-SIXEL - A X server implementation for SIXEL-featured terminals, based on @pelya's Xsdl kdrive server(https://github.com/pelya/xserver-xsdl)

CEGUI