libui: a portable GUI library for C

This README is being written.

Announcements

• 18 June 2016

  • Help decide the design of tables and trees in libui; the implementation starts within the next few days, if not tomorrow!

• 17 June 2016

  • CMake 3.1.0 is now required. This is due to CMake's rapid development pace in the past few years adding things libui needs to build on as many systems as possible. If your OS is supported by libui but its repositories ship with an older version of CMake, you will need to find an updated one somewhere.
  • Please help plan out a better menu API.

• 5 June 2016

  • Alpha 3.1 is here. This was a much-needed update to Alpha 3 that changes a few things:
    • The build system is now cmake. cmake 2.8.11 or higher is needed.
    • Static linking is now fully possible.
    • MinGW linking is back, but static only.

Old announcements can be found in the ANNOUNCE.md file.

Updates

Note that today's entry (Eastern Time) may be updated later today.

• 17 June 2016

  • uiMainSteps() no longer takes any arguments and no longer needs to invoke a function to do the work. You still need to call it, but once you do, it will return immediately and you can then get right to your main loop.
  • CMake 3.1.0 is now required. This is due to CMake's rapid development pace in the past few years adding things libui needs to build on as many systems as possible. If your OS is supported by libui but its repositories ship with an older version of CMake, you will need to find an updated one somewhere.
  • Added uiNewVerticalSeparator() to complement uiNewHorizontalSeparator().

• 16 June 2016

  • Added uiWindowContentSize(), uiWindowSetContentSize(), and uiWindowOnContentSizeChanged() methods for manipulating uiWindow content sizes. Note the use of "content size"; the size you work with does NOT include window decorations (titlebars, menus, etc.).
  • Added uiWindowFullscreen() and uiWindowSetFullscreen() to allow making fullscreen uiWindows, taking advantage of OS facilities for fullscreen and without changing the screen resolution (!).
  • Added uiWindowBorderless() and uiWindowSetBorderless() for allowing borderless uiWindows.
  • Added uiMainSteps(). You call this instead of uiMain() if you want to run the main loop yourself. You pass in a function that will be called; within that function, you call uiMainStep() repeatedly until it returns 0, doing whatever you need to do in the meantime. (This was needed because just having uiMainStep() by itself only worked on some systems.)
  • Added uiProgressBarValue() and allowed passing -1 to uiProgressBarSetValue() to make an indeterminate progress bar. Thanks to @emersion.

• 15 June 2016

  • Added uiFormDelete(); thanks to @emersion.
  • Added uiWindowPosition(), uiWindowSetPosition(), uiWindowCenter(), and uiWindowOnPositionChanged(), methods for manipulating uiWindow position.

• 14 June 2016

  • uiDarwinControl now has a ChildVisibilityChanged() method and a corresponding NotifyVisibilityChanged() function that is called by the default show/hide handlers. This is used to make visibility changes work on OS X; uiBox, uiForm, and uiGrid all respect these now.
  • The same has been done on the Windows side as well.
  • Hiding and showing controls and padding calculations are now correct on Windows at long last.
  • Hiding a control in a uiForm now hides its label on all platforms.

• 13 June 2016

  • intmax_t and uintmax_t are no longer used for libui API functions; now we use int. This should make things much easier for bindings. int should be at least 32 bits wide; this should be sufficient for all but the most extreme cases.

• 12 June 2016

  • Added uiGrid, a new container control that arranges controls in rows and columns, with stretchy ("expanding") rows, stretchy ("expanding") columns, cells that span rows and columns, and cells whose content is aligned in either direction rather than just filling. It's quite powerful, is it? =P

• 8 June 2016

  • Added uiForm, a new container control that arranges controls vertically, with properly aligned labels on each. Have fun!

• 6 June 2016

  • Added uiRadioButtonsSelected(), uiRadioButtonsSetSelected(), and uiRadioButtonsOnSelected() to control selection of a radio button and catch an event when such a thing happens.

• 5 June 2016

  • Added uiNewPasswordEntry(), which creates a new uiEntry suitable for entering passwords.
  • Added uiNewSearchEntry(), which creates a new uiEntry suitable for searching. On some systems, the OnChanged() event will be slightly delayed and/or combined, to produce a more natural feel when searching.

Old updates can be found in the Changelog.md file.

Runtime Requirements

• Windows: Windows Vista SP2 with Platform Update or newer
• Unix: GTK+ 3.10 or newer
• Mac OS X: OS X 10.8 or newer

Build Requirements

• All platforms:
  • CMake 3.1.0 or newer
• Windows: either
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 or newer (2013 is needed for va_copy()) — you can build either a static or a shared library
  • MinGW-w64 (other flavors of MinGW may not work) — you can only build a static library; shared library support will be re-added once the following features come in:
    • Isolation awareness, which is how you get themed controls from a DLL without needing a manifest
• Unix: nothing else specific
• Mac OS X: nothing else specific, so long as you can build Cocoa programs

Building

Out-of-tree builds typical of cmake are preferred:

$ # you must be in the top-level libui directory, otherwise this won't work
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..

Pass -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF to cmake to build a static library. The standard cmake build configurations are provided; if none is specified, Debug is used.

If you use a makefile generator with cmake, then

$ make
$ make tester         # for the test program
$ make examples       # for examples

and pass VERBOSE=1 to see build commands. Build targets will be in the build/out folder.

Project file generators should work, but are untested by me.

On Windows, I use the Unix Makefiles generator and GNU make (built using the build_w32.bat script included in the source and run in the Visual Studio command line). In this state, if MinGW-w64 (either 32-bit or 64-bit) is not in your %PATH%, cmake will use MSVC by default; otherwise, cmake will use with whatever MinGW-w64 is in your path. set PATH=%PATH%;c:\msys2\mingw(32/64)\bin should be enough to temporarily change to a MinGW-w64 build for the current command line session only if you installed MinGW-w64 through MSYS2; no need to change global environment variables constantly.

Installation

Arch Linux

Can be built from AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libui-git/

Documentation

Needs to be written. Consult ui.h and the examples for details for now.

Language Bindings

libui was originally written as part of my package ui for Go. Now that libui is separate, package ui has become a binding to libui. As such, package ui is the only official binding.

Other people have made bindings to other languages:

Language	Bindings
C#/.net	LibUI.Binding, SharpUI
Crystal	libui.cr
D	DerelictLibui, libuid (complete oo interface)
Euphoria	libui-euphoria
Haskell	libui-haskell
JavaScript	libui.js (merged into libui-node?)
Julia	Libui.jl
Lua	libuilua, libui-lua
Nim	ui
Node.js	libui-node
Python	pylibui
Ruby	libui-ruby
Rust	libui-rs

Screenshots

From examples/controlgallery: