wxWidgets
libui
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wxWidgets | libui | |
---|---|---|
52 | 22 | |
5,721 | 10,590 | |
1.9% | - | |
9.9 | 0.0 | |
6 days ago | over 1 year ago | |
C++ | C | |
- | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
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.
wxWidgets
- Solitaire: Authentic remake of the Windows 95 original
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Building Apps with Tauri and Elixir
The Elixir programming language is no stranger to desktop applications as the language actually supports building them out of the box. It uses wxWidgets: a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. But wxWidgets has a very complex API, and doesn’t solve issues that usually come with desktop applications around packaging.
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WxWidgets – open-source C++ cross platform GUI
Qt is also 100% open/free. In fact, both are available under the LGPL, just that wxWidgets also grants an exception to not have to distribute application sources even when statically linked:
https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets#licence
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Need for GUIs for bioinformatic tools?
But for big programs, ones written in C++? Good luck it won’t be easy at all. You might try wxwidgets or qt. I do not predict trying to click box-ify complex cli tools yielding much success.
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Create desktop application
In theory, you should be able to use FFI to interface with something like wxWindows, but you might again have problems on macOS, I don't know. And to me eyes, Wx looks a bit outdated.
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IUP – Cross platform C GUI library
This seems to be like the classic wxWidgets [1], i.e. it's an API that wraps the underlying platform's default toolkit. So on Windows it uses Windows' native controls, in Linux it seems to use GTK, and so on.
That means that the advantage is being able to write against one API, and get cross-platform compatibility, which can be nice. It also means (typically) being limited in what you can do to the least common denominator, or you (=the toolkit author) end up having to re-implement features from one platform that you want to expose but that are missing on some supported target(s). Or, of course, have an API with non-portable parts in it.
In any case, it means the "look and feel" is not the core feature of the API since that is going to be "like the target platform" and that is the point.
Given the origin, I guess Lua support is important too, here.
[1]: https://www.wxwidgets.org/
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Creating C++ windowed applications
- So, I found wxWidgets. Which looked good. However, when I followed some tutorials I was getting errors. Even when I copied and pasted the tutorial code. Furthermore, the library still doesn't seem to simplify the process much.
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What does this icon belong to? I've seen it used in many pieces of software, but I never found out what it actually is from.
It is the icon for WXWidgets, a programming toolkit for making user interfaces that work on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
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Inkscape is hiring: Accelerating the GTK4 migration
In general, people will use a cross-platform library to port such applications. While QT will likely never really stabilize (I'd flag it unsustainable), the https://www.wxwidgets.org/ is able to be statically linked into commercial and opensource projects at no cost without tripping GPL.
"Hiring a senior C++ developer with GTK experience is costlier"
I think you are confusing skill valuation, and operational productivity. Some have an erroneous notion talent is interchangeable. Likewise, applicants with identical base skill-sets on their CV often mistakenly believe they even have long-term employment options (outsourced, youth tax credit churn, and or senior wage suppression).
Most FOSS people are easier to train, as most already can mitigate utter chaos already. =)
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Is it possible to build a gui which is both cross compatible and native?
There are a few like that in the C++ community. WxWidgets is the most famous/popular with this approach. But it is a library almost impossible to use in other languages because their api is heavily templated.
libui
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Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries
You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.
We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.
Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.
Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.
Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.
Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.
So enjoy Electron I guess.
There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.
Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.
- BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
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Is there no simple GUI library for pure C?
What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Capy – Cross-platform library for making true native GUIs in Zig
Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.
If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Mathematical Patterns
For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.
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libui-ng-sys: external FFI bindings for libui-ng
libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.
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What GUI library should I start with after learning C?
libui
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Not-gtk GUI Libs/frameworks for plain C
https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng
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Ask HN: Is there any cross platform non native GUI written in C that looks good?
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):
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Usable cross-platform GUI?
Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
FLTK - FLTK - Fast Light Tool Kit - https://github.com/fltk/fltk - cross platform GUI development
nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
gtkmm - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtkmm
nana - a modern C++ GUI library
GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
ncurses - snapshots of ncurses - see http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html (no pull requests are accepted)
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL