alt Hacker NewsMicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C
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This has been my goto for personal toy projects for a while now. Trivial to slot in to basically anything that can display text and takes mouse input.
I will mention, however, it's kinda abandonware at this point. There is some bug with the draw call iterator which does a misaligned pointer access, which, if your environment is set up to catch that, can get annoying (Zig for example panics on it). There's a github issue that some have used as reason to fork it but all the forks I tried were subtly wrong, for what that's worth.
I used this one in 2022 to make a proof of concept for a build once / run anywhere graphical app and IIRC the library was quite nice, even if a bit limited. The resulting kludge is at https://github.com/jacereda/cosmogfx and there's a prebuilt binary that should run on Linux, Windows and some BSDs. https://github.com/jacereda/cosmogfx/releases/download/v0.0....
Cosmopolitan Libc has since integrated the bits to make OpenGL work in cross-platform binaries and it's awesome.
This is included in the Odin vendor libraries, it's fantastic for Raylib debug menus
The first thing I look for in any UI library is accessibility support. Makes it trivial to filter out toy projects.
Cool to see a demo in there that you can run in a browser, presumably compiled to WebAssembly. The kind of thing that was unimaginable years ago.
how is this different from lvgl? is this immediate mode or retained mode?
Nice, except the hard part seems to be missing: interfacing with an actual window system (X11, TUI, WIN32, whatever ...)
>"Features
o Tiny: around 1100 sloc of ANSI C
o Works within a fixed-sized memory region: no additional memory is allocated
o Built-in controls: window, scrollable panel, button, slider, textbox, label, checkbox, wordwrapped text
o Works with any rendering system that can draw rectangles and text
o Designed to allow the user to easily add custom controls
o Simple layout system"
Immediate-mode in pure C is a nice constraint. how does it handle text rendering, do you bring your own atlas or is there something built in? Thats usually the part that balloons the dependency footprint.
I wrote a little demo to run microui on top of the sokol headers here, it's really interesting in how minimal it is.
WASM demo: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/sgl-microui-sapp.html
Source code: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/sapp/sgl...
The renderer backend is just a bunch of C functions you need to provide:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/3f4185a8578cd2b...
It's also interesting to compare the binary sizes:
microui sample (https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/sgl-microui-sapp.html): 79.6 KBytes compressed download
Nuklear sample (https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/nuklear-sapp.html): 155 kb compressed download
Dear ImGui sample (https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-sapp.html): 491 KB compressed download