MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C

Posted by peter_d_sherman 3 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by flohofwoe 12 minutes ago

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

Comment by kartoffelsaft 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by packetlost 39 minutes ago

> it's kinda abandonware at this point

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

Comment by haeseong 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by kettlez 1 hour ago

This is included in the Odin vendor libraries, it's fantastic for Raylib debug menus

Comment by abtinf 2 hours ago

The first thing I look for in any UI library is accessibility support. Makes it trivial to filter out toy projects.

Comment by RodgerTheGreat 2 hours ago

"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.

Comment by Dwedit 1 hour ago

One clearly defined starting point is exposing any custom controls to accessibility APIs that are used to enumerate and interact (simulated mouse actions, reading the text, etc) with controls on the screen. Both scripting tools and screen readers make use of these. Built-in controls already have the enumeration and interaction feature and don't need additional code, but custom controls may not have that.

In the MicroUI example here, there are buttons and text labels and other kinds of controls, but no ability for an outside process to enumerate or interact with the controls. Any program will just set a single giant window with no text and no controls inside. Accessibility software can still hook text output APIs, but not if it also uses custom font rendering.

Anyway, the Windows accessibility API is just implementing a few COM objects, and COM (other than the specific ABI used for storing the vtable and function call convention) is not necessarily specific to Win32.

Comment by jazzypants 2 hours ago

This is one of the reasons why web technology is so popular and persistent. You get almost all of that for free as long as you use semantic HTML.

Comment by xyzzy_plugh 2 hours ago

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/

Comment by qsera 1 hour ago

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!

Comment by whizzter 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by monocasa 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by fwip 1 hour ago

Being accessible to the intended users always matters. If you think it doesn't, that probably means it's currently accessible to those users (or that those who are it is inaccessible to have filtered themselves out, and are no longer users).

For example - in your debug UI, colorblind-friendly colors don't matter, until you hire your twelfth member of the team, who struggles to tell red and green apart.

Comment by monocasa 42 minutes ago

This library's default is greyscale anyway, so it's by default colorblind friendly.

Comment by spwa4 2 hours ago

Then just save yourself some time. Immediate mode and accessibility are mutually exclusive.

Comment by jdmoreira 1 hour ago

What? On a micro immediate mode UI?

Really insane comment TBH

Comment by dwb 33 minutes ago

The point of a UI library is to interface with users. If it totally fails to interface with a subset of users then it is obviously deficient to some degree. It is callous and foolish to dismiss offhand users who rely on assistive technologies. You probably have a poor idea of who they are and how many people we’re talking about. You never know when you or someone you care about will become one of them, even temporarily. You never know how far your software will reach when you write it.

Comment by OvervCW 1 hour ago

What is the advantage of this compared to Dear Imgui?

Comment by ranger_danger 1 hour ago

it's lighter weight and written in C

Comment by afavour 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by synergy20 2 hours ago

how is this different from lvgl? is this immediate mode or retained mode?

Comment by peter_d_sherman 3 hours ago

>"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"

Comment by ur-whale 2 hours ago

Nice, except the hard part seems to be missing: interfacing with an actual window system (X11, TUI, WIN32, whatever ...)

Comment by exDM69 2 hours ago

That's the whole point!

You plug it into your project and it can be rendered on anything that can push pixels and/or triangles to the screen. Events from windowing system go in, list of triangles comes out.

This is intended to be used with OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D and other graphics environment and used in cases where integrating a "real" GUI toolkit would be more trouble than it's worth.

Other popular libs like Dear Imgui or Egui work the same way.

Comment by foul 2 hours ago

In demo/ someone can "steal" the renderer part which, being based on SDL, is to some extent cross-platform.

Comment by Littice 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by dvhh 49 minutes ago

it does not, it basically delegate that part to lower level library for which you have to write the glue code for, there is an example for SDL.