pixeltoaster VS microui

SDL would be fine since it only uses the bits it needs , but there is https://github.com/thedmd/pixeltoaster it's c++ based but you can interface it to C and its basically a framebuffer, previous versions being openptc/tinyptc.

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

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.

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".

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

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

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.