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Improved User Interface

A cross-platform UI toolkit for Rust based on libui

travis-ci build status libui-rs appveyor build status badge actively developed badge

iui: iui crates.io version badge docs.rs for iui ui-sys: ui-sys crates.io version badge docs.rs for ui-sys

iui is a simple (about 4 kLOC of Rust), small (about 800kb, including libui), easy to distribute (one shared library) GUI library, providing a Rusty user interface library that binds to native APIs via the libui and the ui-sys bindings crate.

iui wraps native retained mode GUI libraries, like Win32API on Windows, Cocoa on Mac OS X, and GTK+ on Linux and elsewhere. Thus all iui apps have a native look and feel and start from a highly performant base which is well integegrated with the native ecosystem on each platform. Because it implements only the least common subset of these platform APIs, your apps will work on all platforms and won't have significant behavioral inconsistencies, with no additional effort on your part.

Using

Add iui to your project with:

iui = "0.3"

Then, in your code, all you have to do is:

  1. create a UI handle, initializing the UI library and guarding against memory unsafety
  2. make a window, or a few, with title and platform-native decorations, into which your app will be drawn
  3. add all your controls, like buttons and text inputs, laid out with both axial and grid layout options
  4. implement some callbacks for user input, taking full advantage of Rust's concurrency protections
  5. call UI::main, or take control over the event processing with an EventLoop, and voíla! A GUI!

Or, you can track the master branch, which may be broken and whose API often changes, with:

iui = { git = "https://github.com/rust-native-ui/libui-rs.git" }

We have documentation on docs.rs for released versions and on github for master.

Examples

Three example GUI applications running on Linux

Check out the examples/ directory from the latest release for these examples and more.

Organization

This repository contains multiple Rust crates:

  • iui is the safe Rust wrapper, to be used by most users.
  • ui-sys is the raw unsafe bindings to the libui C code. Requires cmake so it can build libui. libui is included as a submodule.

Also be sure to look at our changelog and learn how to contribute.

Building ui-sys

ui-sys includes libui as a sub-module and allows it to be built on-the-fly with the default features fetch and build. With fetch disabled, it will simply build the existing sources without updating them, and with build disabled it will build nothing, assuming either a system or local (in ./lib/) version of libui is available.

Note that most of the time, building libui on the fly is what you want. It does however require a copy of cmake, essential build tools, et cetera.

Acknowledgments

Based on work by @pcwalton.