Stars: libui
Sometimes you just want some native UI without having to depend on a huge framework1.
| Summary | |
|---|---|
| Repo | libui andlabs/libui: Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports. |
| License | MIT |
| Language | C, Objective C, C++ |
| Status | Complete. Active. Several commits a month. |
Review
Before coming across libui, I actually wondered why such a thing doesn’t exist: a simple and small library which allows you to whip-up some native UI and forget about it. A library which is focused on creating GUI and isn’t trying to be a million other things2. I don’t care about extending the library3. Typically all I want are some buttons, some edit boxes, perhaps a list box and that’s it.
Well, as it turns out, such a library does exist. It’s libui: my star of the day for today. Even’t though it’s nowhere near as powerful as Qt, or wxWidgets, it has a bunch of useful features but most of all it’s much, much easier to build, integrate, and use. It’s written in C for Unix systems, C++ for windows, and Objective C for mac OS, but it has a simple C interface, so it’s trivial to create a binding for your language of choice, and many bindings already do exist.
Now, as I said, my requirements are typically modest, but ever since I first saw libui, I haven’t written any code for Qt, so, there’s that.
Definitely worth checking out!
This post is part of my Project Stars where I post a short review for each of the 500+ repos that I’ve starred on GitHub.
For more posts of this series see the tag stars in this blog.
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