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  • How can such a library be both tiny and portable, when the C standard library has no graphics facilities? Don't you need to lay down a lot of basis for different platforms and graphics backends, to be portable? And if you do that, how can you be tiny?
    by einpoklum
  • Almost all of these immediate mode UI libraries for C/C++ come without a rendering backend. Usually there are "example" implementations for libraries like SDL that you can use, or you implement your own backend. A lot of these libraries are popular for debug UIs in games and you probably need a custom backend for whatever graphics engine you use in your game.
    by b3orn
  • The first thing I look for in any UI library is accessibility support. Makes it trivial to filter out toy projects.
    by abtinf
  • Is there any game engine out there with good accessibility support for their UI?
    by ricardobeat
  • Windows XP has better accessibility than anything since, by virtue of staying entirely out of the way of accessibility tools. Time to downgrade!
    by functionmouse
  • Everything is an engineering decision. Leaving out something doesn't mean it's a "toy". So, I don't really get your criticism here.
    by HumblyTossed
  • Or, not every UI library is intended for use cases where a13y even makes sense.

    Like a debug UI in a game engine, or in an embedded device that doesn't even have input for a13y.

    by monocasa
  • Not very smart. I would go further and say that even full unicode support could be avoided and a software can still be massively useful.

    It is sad that the world is so hung up on unicode and things like accessibility that we all have to submit to the tyranny of browser layers!

    by qsera
  • This is a library in similar vein to "Dear imgui", minimal requirements for integration (rectangle and text rendering) so that it's easy to embed into game-engines,etc for debug UI's and similar things.
    by whizzter
  • No. As much as I would like it to be the case, that is most certainly a poor criteria to evaluate a UI library.

    Dear ImGui [0] is without a doubt the most prevalent immediate mode UI library. It does not have native accessibility features, but that hasn't stopped companies such as Intel, Meta, IKEA and Google from shipping products built upon it. It's also used in a ton of games.

    Calling Dear ImGui a toy project at this point would be like calling Unreal Engine a toy project.

    It's a shame accessibility support is not more widespread, and furthermore it's a shame that it is so laborious to add it.

    0: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/

    by xyzzy_plugh
  • "Accessibility" is an open-ended set of functionality, not a checkbox; it is never "complete", there is always room for improvement. Colorblind support (which ones)? High-Contrast mode? Adjustable text size? Screenreader integration? Localization? IME support? Keyboard navigation? Keyboard remapping? Functional entirely without a keyboard? Touch support? Pen support? Dyslexia-aiding typefaces? The list goes on and on.
    by RodgerTheGreat
  • I've created a similar (minimal, lightweight, ANSI C) UI library, which is even easier to use.

    https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/smgui

    I don't like immediate-mode, because you must handle everything in the same thread, so mine is a state-mode GUI.

    For immediate-mode and ANSI C, there's also Nuklear:

    https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear

    This latter has all the bells and whistles.

    by skrellm
  • love the web assembly demo. By the way, I hope this kind of interface for the web becomes more mainstream in the future, I start to hate html / css cuz everything looks the same because of it (even in the train stations they use it for scheduling)
    by shideneyu
  • >"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"

    by peter_d_sherman
  • 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.
    by afavour
  • For a slightly larger, cross-platform, retained mode GUI written in C, there's libagar [0]. Different use case than MicroUI, but still a neat project.

    [0] https://libagar.org/

    by 0x0203
  • If that's your project, the Arabic text rendering is broken in this screenshot:

    https://libagar.org/screenshots/agar171.png

    by Narishma
  • This is included in the Odin vendor libraries, it's fantastic for Raylib debug menus
    by kettlez
  • Raylib also has Raygui

    https://github.com/raysan5/raygui

    But I found it pretty straightforward (and satisfying) to just build my own gui functions/widgets with raylib (inspired by raygui).

    https://github.com/dsego/strobe-tuner/blob/main/app/gui.odin

    by dsego
  • Also see: https://rxi.github.io/microui_v2_an_implementation_overview....
    by jmiskovic
  • 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.

    by jacereda
  • 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.

    by kartoffelsaft
  • > it's kinda abandonware at this point

    That's sad. I'm a fan of rxi's work, including this one.

    by packetlost
  • Genuine question; abandonware or complete? Something of this size serves as a nice substrate or starting-point regardless.
    by leecommamichael
  • The whole thing's less than 2kLoCs. If it needs ongoing maintenance, something's gone wrong IMO.

    I think it's reasonable to just patch it yourself if it doesn't work with your other tools (Zig). Though thank you for sharing the heads up.

    by Intralexical
  • 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

    by flohofwoe
  • I asked Claude to write one from scratch. A few minutes later it was done with exactly the features I needed. I started with some existing one, but when it couldn't handle multiple pointers (2 hands in VR/AR each with a pointer) without major mods I end up asking Claude if it could replace it with a custom one.

    It first said "that's a ton of work" to which I said, "Really? A basic IMGUI needs a texture with glyphs. The abiltiy to draw textured rectangles with vertex colors. Scissor support for clipping. Some hit testing." and it was like, "yea, you're right", and a few mins later it wrote what I needed.

    I'm not saying you shouldn't use this library.

    by socalgal2
  • pretty nifty but im trying to figure out what the use case for this is when its aimed at hobbyists ?

    I use pygtk and dont have to fiddle with lower level stuff

    by zuzululu
  • Why is the WASM demo so fuzzy? I am on Windows/Firefox.

    https://imgur.com/uy78t52

    by starik36
  • I made my own WASM demo @ https://microui-wasm.vercel.app/ and it's only 14.6 kB compressed!

    Will share source code if someone is interested, but key bits:

    - had a small JS glue layer using CanvasRenderingContext2D to render

    - made a `wasm32-freestanding` build to lower the wasm bundle size, which meant shimming the bits of the libc microui uses

    by onsclom