8 ms·

Dear ImGui: Graphical User Interface library for C++

146 points by _benj 3y ago

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
Does anyone know what the name is a reference to?
- _benj 3y ago
  Idk about “dear” but ImGUI I believe stand for “immediate mode graphical user interface”
- laserbeam 3y ago
  From the faq https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-what-is-this-library-called https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w... Q. What is this library called? This library is called Dear ImGui. Please refer to it as Dear ImGui (not ImGui, not IMGUI). (The library misleadingly started its life in 2014 as "ImGui" due to the fact that I didn't give it a proper name when I released 1.0, and had no particular expectation that it would take off. However, the term IMGUI (immediate-mode graphical user interface) was coined before and is being used in variety of other situations e.g. Unity uses it own implementation of the IMGUI paradigm. To reduce the ambiguity without affecting existing code bases, I have decided in December 2015 a fully qualified name "Dear ImGui" for this library.
- 1propionyl 3y ago
  My first guess would be it is supposed to sound like "Dear Imogen". However, it wasn't initially conceived of as a reference to anything. The "Dear" was tacked on to qualify the name [1]. [1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-what-is-this-library-called https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w...
  - ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
    Just seems like a weird way to qualify the name is all.
    - cristeigabriel 3y ago
      I think it fits, Dear ImGui is the most popular immediate mode GUI, and it's what most people think of when they hear "imgui" even though I've seen people shorten "immediate mode GUI" to "imgui" too.
      - cxr 3y ago
        Help me out here. How does it being "the most popular immediate mode GUI, and it's what most people think of" translate into "Dear ImGui"? A couple explanations have been offered in response to the question, but they're all non-answers. As if the explanation is self-evident and need not be explicitly stated. And as if the respondents aren't able to grok that an explanation is exactly what the question is asking for.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
The related DearPyGUI is so cool. https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui
- bgribble 3y ago
  I have been a fairly devoted user of Gtk in my Python programs for about 20 years. Back then, it was a clean, simple, functional toolkit that just worked. Dear ImGUI cleans Gtk's clock in the "clean", "simple", "functional", and "just works" categories these days, and I am currently porting my biggest side project from Gtk to Imgui. If you are trying to "integrate with the (GNOME) desktop", I'm sure you should still use Gtk, but for most purposes I don't see the point. It seems from the outside like there are few core Gtk developers left, and they are basically in life support mode for an entire desktop suite, one that is stuck between two broken display engines (Xorg and Wayland) with no way to really fix things and every desktop Linux user expecting miracles. ImGUI is just a busy dude banging away on a single toolkit, without the baggage of millions of nontechnical users to support. As a developer, I know which one is going to be producing the good stuff.
127361 3y ago
Beautiful interface design there, and it's fully customizable to your liking as well. It also supports keyboard shortcuts.
- OskarS 3y ago
  You really think so? This is really my biggest issue with Dear ImGui, I think it just looks awful. The design is just not great, and stuff like text rendering has been terrible in every Dear ImGui UI I've seen. Especially on macOS, the native applications there really make ImGui stuff look pretty crappy. Electron apps also generally speaking just look way better, IMHO (Electron has other issues obviously, but the ones I use regularly look pretty good). Like, imagine VSCode or something with the graphical style of the screenshots on the GitHub page. Maybe you can customize it and make it look great, but the "out of the box" experience is just... oof.
  - 127361 3y ago
    Yes, you can customize it, both the color scheme and the element spacing. And the font scaling (the internal resolution in the texture) can be fixed to make the fonts look nicer. Someone made a subpixel font rendering patch for ImGUI as well.
  - cristeigabriel 3y ago
    ImGui supports multiple text rasterizers.
  - HelloNurse 3y ago
    Normally, in a game there is a completely separate not-awful-looking GUI system for the player, pushing Dear ImGui towards the opposite niches: simple in order to be easy and efficient to write rather than complex in order to be general and flexible, evolution through changing (mostly adding) widgets and assimilating more data rather than through improved appearance and behaviour of a relatively simple and stable GUI, "just working" and low churn rather than configurable, cheap rather than accessible, and so on.
bArray 3y ago
I've used Dear PyGui [1], which is based on this, and it has been a mixed bag. It's fast and basic functionality is super simple. The documentation is somewhat lacking when you wanted to start doing something non-standard. I would still rate it quite highly all things considered. [1] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui
tomovo 3y ago
Spotting it in various videos of scientific, game development & graphics tools is a bit like hearing the Wilhelm scream in movies.
- TillE 3y ago
  Yeah it's a heartwarming open source success story in game development. Everybody uses it for internal tools (just check their sponsors list to start with), and it occasionally shows up as like a debug menu in production code.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  I've dabbled with Qt and other heavy GUI tools before. Switching to Imgui was a breath of fresh air. And I love how it allows me develop for Windows, Linux and MacOs with minimal overhead.
flohofwoe 3y ago
I just used Dear ImGui in a VSCode tab in the last couple of weeks [1] :) ...indirectly by embedding a home computer emulator with a Dear ImGui debugger UI, compiled to WASM+WebGL running in a webview panel, but the idea to use Dear ImGui for tooling UIs in VSCode extensions where HTML+CSS might be too awkward is certainly interesting (think not just "traditional UIs", but also things like noodle-graphs, flame-graphs, diagrams... the vector renderer coming with Dear ImGui is great for that type of stuff). [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.vscode-kcide https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...
- mortallywounded 3y ago
  > ..by embedding a home computer emulator with a Dear ImGui debugger UI, compiled to WASM+WebGL running in a webview panel... People wonder why their Electron apps use 16GB of memory.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    ...and yet there's no realistic way to implement such an extension for any other IDE without resorting to per-platform-compiled and potentially unsafe native code :) The embedded emulator including the Dear ImGui debugging UI compiled to WASM is just around 700 KBytes, runs on all platforms (even in the VSCode browser version) and is safely sandboxed, that same code compiled to a native executable on macOS is 847 KBytes, doesn't run on any other OS without compiling another version, and would be blocked to run anyway because it is potentially unsafe.
    - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
      Turns out VScode is indeed a web browser in disguise, who would have thought!
      - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
        Downvoters, educate yourself a little bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
slalomskiing 3y ago
I’ve worked with a lot of different UI frameworks (both native and web) and ImGui is definitely my favourite It’s just so simple For example adding an input box for editing a float value is one line of code and the syncing is done by just passing it a pointer.
nox100 3y ago
Dear ImGUI is amazing and I wish all UI development was so easy and simple. That said, be aware its original purpose is as a UI for internal game dev tools and not customer facing tool. It's neither international friendly nor accessibility friendly. Those are 2 feature usually not needed for internal tools.
- linhns 3y ago
  It’s amazing on its own but not so much when combined with other libs.
- truakon89 3y ago
  Even Rockstar devs use it, saw it on some of the leak videos of gta6
jakelazaroff 3y ago
A word of caution that Dear ImGui is specifically made for building internal tools quickly rather than production-grade UIs. Relevant quote from the docs: > Dear ImGui is designed to enable fast iterations and to empower programmers to create content creation tools and visualization / debug tools (as opposed to UI for the average end-user). It favors simplicity and productivity toward this goal and lacks certain features commonly found in more high-level libraries. Here's a quote from my comment [1] on an earlier discussion about Dear ImGui vs. "bloated" browser APIs: > This is what I hear when I enable VoiceOver on macOS and open Discord (either the web app or the desktop app): > 1. “Discord, friends - Discord window, direct messages, selected cell” > 2. “You are currently on a cell inside of a table. To navigate the cells within a table, press…” > 3. (when navigating with the keyboard) “1 mention, $SERVER_NAME, cell” “$SERVER_NAME, cell” etc > And here’s when I do the same with a random Dear ImGui app I have installed: > 1. “$APP_NAME, $APP_NAME window, $APP_NAME window” > 2. “You are currently in a window” > 3. (when navigating with the keyboard) [silence; no additional instructions] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37302809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37302809
- Conscat 3y ago
  Yet people do indeed make professional software with it, such as RemedyBG.
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    Is RemedyBG actually accessible to blind users though?
    - mwcampbell 3y ago
      No. Just bought it so I could check. Edit: I'd be happy to spend some time helping the developer with this if they're interested.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3y ago
devmor 3y ago
My introduction to this UI was actually from a (unapproved) 3rd party modding framework developed for the MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. The tool creators needed some way to provide mod developers with access to a unified UI, and hooking the game’s built-in UI was far too high effort for the reward. I played around with it to develop a couple mods for fun and have since become a huge fan of it, and started using Dear ImGUI to add interfaces to some of my personal tools that were previously CLI-only.
Ralo 3y ago
Looking at the leaked GTA VI videos and seeing ImGui being used by Rockstar internally is pretty neat how even a multi-billion dollar studio will use the same open source project we all use.
- danhau 3y ago
  Reminds me of that „A PROJECT SOME RANDOM PERSON IN NEBRASKA HAS BEEN THANKLESSLY MAINTAINING SINCE 2003 image.“ Sorry for caps (transcribed from image).
  - KomoD 3y ago
    https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
  - shrubble 3y ago
    Alternatively, the "runk" tool https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/umg9ps/runk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/umg9ps/run...
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    > Sorry for the caps You can use tr to quickly convert it to lowercase: pbpaste | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' (Though I usually paste text in VSCodium and convert it there.)
zengid 3y ago
I'd like to see a middle ground between immediate mode and retained mode, where the UI is more like a scene-graph where you have nodes with transforms, but you can draw anything inside them, and the framework will keep track of all the matrix math for you like a game engine would. Maybe no one would find that useful, but its something I'd like to tinker with.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  My personal IMGUI library [1] is what I call "partially retained" in that there is an immediate mode API similar to dear imgui or nuklear on top, but under the hood the immediate mode API just manages retained mode object graphs for you automatically. This is a fantastic (imo) way to build user interfaces, because sometimes the most convenient way to manage state or construct a complex widget is to write a retained mode object that hosts some other child objects, and in other circumstances it's most convenient to write a modal dialog or something by just slamming out some imgui code in a standalone function. I also think the imgui approach to layout (use an algorithm that can fully reconstruct your layout from scratch every frame without much of a performance penalty) removes a lot of potential bugs and quirks that are common in UI, like one-frame glitches or having to manually propagate state through a bunch of objects and layers. Though imgui approaches have their own downsides, like the "page tearing" issue. I've had to do some weird contortions to solve that one in my own code and I still get bugs occasionally. The game I'm building right now does almost all of its scene layout and UI as a single graph of components that mix retained and immediate mode, and it's been a relaxing way to do things compared to the 'manually paint widgets in places and do hit testing' approach I've used for some previous titles. A large portion of the UI is constructed via what I'd call 'value replication', where a container control is attached to a list of game objects (entities, components attached to entities, parameters to a script) and then the container automatically creates a list of child controls for each game object automatically. This allows easy virtualization (i.e. only having 20 controls to represent a scrolling view with 1000 items) and means I don't have to manually do a bunch of state synchronization. 1: https://github.com/sq/Libraries/tree/master/Squared/PRGUI https://github.com/sq/Libraries/tree/master/Squared/PRGUI
  - 3y ago
cedws 3y ago
ImGui is brilliant. I can highly recommend this hex editor built using it: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
lxe 3y ago
Is there a non-webgpu wasm/emscripten demo somewhere? I remember seeing a ton of them earlier. Or maybe I'm thinking of the rust version: https://github.com/emilk/egui https://github.com/emilk/egui
- joeld42 3y ago
  There's a bunch here https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples For example, the basic demo window: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-sapp.html https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-sapp.html
- ocornut 3y ago
  Also see the interactive web manual https://pthom.github.io/imgui_manual_online/manual/imgui_manual.html https://pthom.github.io/imgui_manual_online/manual/imgui_man...
kelvie 3y ago
I've also played around with the Rust version egui, and with the eframe template it's super easy to bang out super quick GUI tools on github pages (for example, I made a basic guitar fretboard chord finder [1] to help me learn guitar in a few hours, plus a few more hours refining it) The mental model of immediate mode guis makes it really easy to work on it as a side project with 10-20 minutes here or there before bed, though doing proper layout to make it look nice is sometimes a challenge. The other advantage is that I can just jump into the implementation, and the egui code itself is pretty easy to grok. [1] https://kelvie.github.io/chord-finder https://kelvie.github.io/chord-finder
- kelvie 3y ago
  One thing I will add is that this paradigm really encourages either making a ton of functions (which IMO makes code flow harder to read for these kinds of low-effort projects), or having a lot of scoped statements. A good addition would be something like how flutter's LSP-based tools, which I use in Emacs), have a "wrap with widget" auto-refactoring tool, for e.g. when you want to wrap an entire widget tree in a new layout without having to do it manually.
- cristeigabriel 3y ago
  Egui is not the "Rust version" of ImGui. There's libraries which allow for ImGui in other languages by applying the hourglass pattern first (making a C api for the C++ api), to allow for the creation of bindings, since most languages support C FFI, and then somebody writes an API in the target language which calls to (and maybe extends) the C api.
  - buildartefact 3y ago
    egui is pure rust. It is not a rust binding of ImGUI
    - cristeigabriel 3y ago
      I am aware. I am asserting the distinction there.
dazzawazza 3y ago
I've written video game editors in Win32, MFC, wxWidgets, Fox Toolkit, Qt, Cocoa and Dear ImGUI. I will never use anything other than Dear ImGUI from now on. The explicitness, lack of state, speed of development and maintainability of the code means it wins hands down. Well worth investing your time in and if you are a leader in the games industry well worth supporting financially.
- cristeigabriel 3y ago
  I believe you mean the (general) transparency of state? But yes, that's quite great when you're getting stuff together quickly. It's even used for more serious stuff, where immediate mode is a necessity.
  - mort96 3y ago
    The "lack of state" refers to being immediate mode rather than retained mode.
    - cristeigabriel 3y ago
      It does require some state in the back for everything to work as it does.
      - mort96 3y ago
        Of course. The API is stateless but the implementation isn't. That's usually how good immediate mode APIs work.
        prewett 3y ago
        Dear ImGUI is just retained mode under the hood, with the name of the widget acting as the index. The API presents immediate mode, but it isn't really. If a "good" immediate mode API just hides all the state under the hood, then I think one should call it something other than immediate mode. The thing is, immediate mode UIs are not really usable, because a widget needs internal state, so a pure immediate mode UI would require the caller to carry around all that state. Obviously that is burdensome, which is why Dear ImGUI hides it for you. But in my opinion, it's a bit of a fraud to call that an immediate mode UI, when it retains a copy of state behind its back.
oddthink 3y ago
Is the selling point for this easier custom widgets than in other frameworks? Maybe my standards are too low, but for quick internal tools, it's hard to beat 30-year-old Tcl+Tk.
- slabity 3y ago
  The selling point is described quite well under "The Pitch" section of the README. Unlike most other toolkits, this one doesn't actually handle its own rendering/contexts. It outputs the low-level vertex buffers and textures that you can pull into your own graphics pipeline. Which means you can integrate it into any sort of 3d application or backend that you want.
soulbadguy 3y ago
Naive question from someone who hasn't touched GUI programming since visual studio/QT GUI designer circa 2005 : Isn't a more declarative approached like XAML/QML (or even html/ccs) a better way to represent a GUI interface as opposed to an imperative list of command embedded inside the business logic of the application ? How does IMGUI handle theming, reflow or even GPU acceleration on different platform ? It seems to me that a more declarive representation would allow for better tooling and easier split between presentation and themes to match the native platform.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Dear ImGui code actually looks quite declarative, except that the actions are directly 'inlined' into the UI declaration as code. For instance: if (ImGui::Button("Click Me")) { // do the stuff that should happen when the button is clicked } To hide a part of the UI you simply skip the code which describes that part of the UI. if (!btnHidden) { if (ImGui::Button("Click Me")) { ... } } Your code describes what the UI should look like in the current frame, and what should happen on user interactions, but without event listeners or callback functions. How you keep the UI declaration separate from the "business logic" is up to you. Dear ImGui allows very close coupling (which quite often is actually an advantage for adhoc UIs), or you can keep both separated as much as you prefer. > How does IMGUI handle theming, reflow or even GPU acceleration on different platform ? Dear ImGui actually builds an internal "stateful" representation of the UI declaration (it needs to remember at least some state between frames, otherwise simple features like moveable/sizeable windows wouldn't be possible) and then generates an optimized list of rendering commands that plug almost directly into 3D rendering APIs like D3D, Metal, GL etc... (the renderer is implemented outside of Dear ImGui by yourself, however Dear ImGui also comes with pluggable example renderers and window system glue for pretty much any platform and 3D API). Themeing/skinning is indeed a weak point of Dear ImGui specifically, other immediate mode UI frameworks like Nuklear offer more flexibility there, but this has nothing to do with the imgui philosophy, only with feature sets of specific imgui libraries.
- msk-lywenn 3y ago
  Are you asking about the IMGUI paradigm or DearIMGUI the library? In the case of DearIMGUI: - it does not handle theming (but forks do) - I don't know what reflow is - in a way, GPU acceleration is the default. In fact, DearIMGUI doesn't handle anything at all in that regards because it doesn't have to. You are the one responsible for drawing, DearIMGUI just outputs you a vertex buffer that you send to the GPU the way you want to. There are proposed backends but you can totally roll your own. People even have made networked and web backends. I don't know how those work.
Thaxll 3y ago
I worked at multiple major video games studio and they all used ImGui internally, most of the time it was for debug in-game ui.
jckl 3y ago
In school, another student and I used ImGui for a music sampler. In retrospect it could have a more friendly interface heh. https://github.com/EmissionControl2/EmissionControl2 https://github.com/EmissionControl2/EmissionControl2
- rollcat 3y ago
  Arguably music/"creativity" apps is exactly where immediate mode GUIs shine the most. Predictable latency, instant feedback, ease of mapping the state to a visual representation, reliability and robustness. I can't think of a better match.
rossant 3y ago
An incredibly powerful GUI library. Not easy to use, only for experienced developers. It's quite useful for scientific visualization as well! Many kudos to the main developer and the community.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  > Not easy to use, only for experienced developers. Personally I found it a lot easier to grok than (for example) React or Qt (as two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum).
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? Visual Node Graph with ImGui - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702059 - Sept 2023 (90 comments) ImPlot: Interactive plotting library, ImGui style - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000594 - Aug 2023 (39 comments) ImGUI Ported to a LiteX SoC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540206 - Jan 2023 (12 comments) Show HN: ImThemes – a Dear ImGui theme browser and editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32290700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32290700 - July 2022 (1 comment) Show HN: Python Live GUI – A Hybrid of Dear ImGUI and Phoenix LiveView - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679945 - June 2022 (19 comments) Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24986908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24986908 - Nov 2020 (180 comments) ImPlot: Advanced 2D Plotting for Dear ImGui - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23128262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23128262 - May 2020 (6 comments) Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Immediate Mode GUI for C++ with minimal dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065472 - May 2020 (1 comment) Runtime Compiled C++ Dear ImGui and DirectX11 Tutorial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22233109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22233109 - Feb 2020 (12 comments) Could ImGUI Be the Future of GUIs? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745809 - April 2019 (124 comments) Immediate Mode GUI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744513 - April 2019 (128 comments) ImGui: Bloat-Free Immediate Mode GUI for C++ with Minimal Dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121600 - Oct 2018 (1 comment) ImGui: Bloat-Free Immediate Mode Graphical UI for C++ with Minimal Dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16193560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16193560 - Jan 2018 (1 comment) Using ImGui with modern C++ and STL for creating game dev tools – Part 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148661 - July 2016 (33 comments) Imgui: Immediate Mode Graphical User Interface with minimal dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161601 - Aug 2014 (41 comments) Sol on Immediate Mode GUIs (IMGUI) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4201748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4201748 - July 2012 (15 comments)

146 points by _benj 3y ago

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago

Does anyone know what the name is a reference to?

_benj 3y ago
Idk about “dear” but ImGUI I believe stand for “immediate mode graphical user interface”
laserbeam 3y ago
From the faq https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-what-is-this-library-called https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w... Q. What is this library called? This library is called Dear ImGui. Please refer to it as Dear ImGui (not ImGui, not IMGUI). (The library misleadingly started its life in 2014 as "ImGui" due to the fact that I didn't give it a proper name when I released 1.0, and had no particular expectation that it would take off. However, the term IMGUI (immediate-mode graphical user interface) was coined before and is being used in variety of other situations e.g. Unity uses it own implementation of the IMGUI paradigm. To reduce the ambiguity without affecting existing code bases, I have decided in December 2015 a fully qualified name "Dear ImGui" for this library.
1propionyl 3y ago
My first guess would be it is supposed to sound like "Dear Imogen". However, it wasn't initially conceived of as a reference to anything. The "Dear" was tacked on to qualify the name [1]. [1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-what-is-this-library-called https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w...
- ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
  Just seems like a weird way to qualify the name is all.
  - cristeigabriel 3y ago
    I think it fits, Dear ImGui is the most popular immediate mode GUI, and it's what most people think of when they hear "imgui" even though I've seen people shorten "immediate mode GUI" to "imgui" too.
    - cxr 3y ago
      Help me out here. How does it being "the most popular immediate mode GUI, and it's what most people think of" translate into "Dear ImGui"? A couple explanations have been offered in response to the question, but they're all non-answers. As if the explanation is self-evident and need not be explicitly stated. And as if the respondents aren't able to grok that an explanation is exactly what the question is asking for.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

The related DearPyGUI is so cool. https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui

bgribble 3y ago
I have been a fairly devoted user of Gtk in my Python programs for about 20 years. Back then, it was a clean, simple, functional toolkit that just worked. Dear ImGUI cleans Gtk's clock in the "clean", "simple", "functional", and "just works" categories these days, and I am currently porting my biggest side project from Gtk to Imgui. If you are trying to "integrate with the (GNOME) desktop", I'm sure you should still use Gtk, but for most purposes I don't see the point. It seems from the outside like there are few core Gtk developers left, and they are basically in life support mode for an entire desktop suite, one that is stuck between two broken display engines (Xorg and Wayland) with no way to really fix things and every desktop Linux user expecting miracles. ImGUI is just a busy dude banging away on a single toolkit, without the baggage of millions of nontechnical users to support. As a developer, I know which one is going to be producing the good stuff.

127361 3y ago

Beautiful interface design there, and it's fully customizable to your liking as well. It also supports keyboard shortcuts.

OskarS 3y ago
You really think so? This is really my biggest issue with Dear ImGui, I think it just looks awful. The design is just not great, and stuff like text rendering has been terrible in every Dear ImGui UI I've seen. Especially on macOS, the native applications there really make ImGui stuff look pretty crappy. Electron apps also generally speaking just look way better, IMHO (Electron has other issues obviously, but the ones I use regularly look pretty good). Like, imagine VSCode or something with the graphical style of the screenshots on the GitHub page. Maybe you can customize it and make it look great, but the "out of the box" experience is just... oof.
- 127361 3y ago
  Yes, you can customize it, both the color scheme and the element spacing. And the font scaling (the internal resolution in the texture) can be fixed to make the fonts look nicer. Someone made a subpixel font rendering patch for ImGUI as well.
- cristeigabriel 3y ago
  ImGui supports multiple text rasterizers.
- HelloNurse 3y ago
  Normally, in a game there is a completely separate not-awful-looking GUI system for the player, pushing Dear ImGui towards the opposite niches: simple in order to be easy and efficient to write rather than complex in order to be general and flexible, evolution through changing (mostly adding) widgets and assimilating more data rather than through improved appearance and behaviour of a relatively simple and stable GUI, "just working" and low churn rather than configurable, cheap rather than accessible, and so on.

bArray 3y ago

I've used Dear PyGui [1], which is based on this, and it has been a mixed bag. It's fast and basic functionality is super simple. The documentation is somewhat lacking when you wanted to start doing something non-standard. I would still rate it quite highly all things considered. [1] https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui https://github.com/hoffstadt/DearPyGui

tomovo 3y ago

Spotting it in various videos of scientific, game development & graphics tools is a bit like hearing the Wilhelm scream in movies.

TillE 3y ago
Yeah it's a heartwarming open source success story in game development. Everybody uses it for internal tools (just check their sponsors list to start with), and it occasionally shows up as like a debug menu in production code.
tverbeure 3y ago
I've dabbled with Qt and other heavy GUI tools before. Switching to Imgui was a breath of fresh air. And I love how it allows me develop for Windows, Linux and MacOs with minimal overhead.

flohofwoe 3y ago

I just used Dear ImGui in a VSCode tab in the last couple of weeks [1] :) ...indirectly by embedding a home computer emulator with a Dear ImGui debugger UI, compiled to WASM+WebGL running in a webview panel, but the idea to use Dear ImGui for tooling UIs in VSCode extensions where HTML+CSS might be too awkward is certainly interesting (think not just "traditional UIs", but also things like noodle-graphs, flame-graphs, diagrams... the vector renderer coming with Dear ImGui is great for that type of stuff). [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.vscode-kcide https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=floooh.v...

mortallywounded 3y ago
> ..by embedding a home computer emulator with a Dear ImGui debugger UI, compiled to WASM+WebGL running in a webview panel... People wonder why their Electron apps use 16GB of memory.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  ...and yet there's no realistic way to implement such an extension for any other IDE without resorting to per-platform-compiled and potentially unsafe native code :) The embedded emulator including the Dear ImGui debugging UI compiled to WASM is just around 700 KBytes, runs on all platforms (even in the VSCode browser version) and is safely sandboxed, that same code compiled to a native executable on macOS is 847 KBytes, doesn't run on any other OS without compiling another version, and would be blocked to run anyway because it is potentially unsafe.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    Turns out VScode is indeed a web browser in disguise, who would have thought!
    - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
      Downvoters, educate yourself a little bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)

slalomskiing 3y ago

I’ve worked with a lot of different UI frameworks (both native and web) and ImGui is definitely my favourite It’s just so simple For example adding an input box for editing a float value is one line of code and the syncing is done by just passing it a pointer.

nox100 3y ago

Dear ImGUI is amazing and I wish all UI development was so easy and simple. That said, be aware its original purpose is as a UI for internal game dev tools and not customer facing tool. It's neither international friendly nor accessibility friendly. Those are 2 feature usually not needed for internal tools.

linhns 3y ago
It’s amazing on its own but not so much when combined with other libs.
truakon89 3y ago
Even Rockstar devs use it, saw it on some of the leak videos of gta6

jakelazaroff 3y ago

A word of caution that Dear ImGui is specifically made for building internal tools quickly rather than production-grade UIs. Relevant quote from the docs: > Dear ImGui is designed to enable fast iterations and to empower programmers to create content creation tools and visualization / debug tools (as opposed to UI for the average end-user). It favors simplicity and productivity toward this goal and lacks certain features commonly found in more high-level libraries. Here's a quote from my comment [1] on an earlier discussion about Dear ImGui vs. "bloated" browser APIs: > This is what I hear when I enable VoiceOver on macOS and open Discord (either the web app or the desktop app): > 1. “Discord, friends - Discord window, direct messages, selected cell” > 2. “You are currently on a cell inside of a table. To navigate the cells within a table, press…” > 3. (when navigating with the keyboard) “1 mention, $SERVER_NAME, cell” “$SERVER_NAME, cell” etc > And here’s when I do the same with a random Dear ImGui app I have installed: > 1. “$APP_NAME, $APP_NAME window, $APP_NAME window” > 2. “You are currently in a window” > 3. (when navigating with the keyboard) [silence; no additional instructions] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37302809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37302809

Conscat 3y ago
Yet people do indeed make professional software with it, such as RemedyBG.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  Is RemedyBG actually accessible to blind users though?
  - mwcampbell 3y ago
    No. Just bought it so I could check. Edit: I'd be happy to spend some time helping the developer with this if they're interested.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago

devmor 3y ago

My introduction to this UI was actually from a (unapproved) 3rd party modding framework developed for the MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. The tool creators needed some way to provide mod developers with access to a unified UI, and hooking the game’s built-in UI was far too high effort for the reward. I played around with it to develop a couple mods for fun and have since become a huge fan of it, and started using Dear ImGUI to add interfaces to some of my personal tools that were previously CLI-only.

Ralo 3y ago

Looking at the leaked GTA VI videos and seeing ImGui being used by Rockstar internally is pretty neat how even a multi-billion dollar studio will use the same open source project we all use.

danhau 3y ago
Reminds me of that „A PROJECT SOME RANDOM PERSON IN NEBRASKA HAS BEEN THANKLESSLY MAINTAINING SINCE 2003 image.“ Sorry for caps (transcribed from image).
- KomoD 3y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- shrubble 3y ago
  Alternatively, the "runk" tool https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/umg9ps/runk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/umg9ps/run...
- notpushkin 3y ago
  > Sorry for the caps You can use tr to quickly convert it to lowercase: pbpaste | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' (Though I usually paste text in VSCodium and convert it there.)

zengid 3y ago

I'd like to see a middle ground between immediate mode and retained mode, where the UI is more like a scene-graph where you have nodes with transforms, but you can draw anything inside them, and the framework will keep track of all the matrix math for you like a game engine would. Maybe no one would find that useful, but its something I'd like to tinker with.

kevingadd 3y ago
My personal IMGUI library [1] is what I call "partially retained" in that there is an immediate mode API similar to dear imgui or nuklear on top, but under the hood the immediate mode API just manages retained mode object graphs for you automatically. This is a fantastic (imo) way to build user interfaces, because sometimes the most convenient way to manage state or construct a complex widget is to write a retained mode object that hosts some other child objects, and in other circumstances it's most convenient to write a modal dialog or something by just slamming out some imgui code in a standalone function. I also think the imgui approach to layout (use an algorithm that can fully reconstruct your layout from scratch every frame without much of a performance penalty) removes a lot of potential bugs and quirks that are common in UI, like one-frame glitches or having to manually propagate state through a bunch of objects and layers. Though imgui approaches have their own downsides, like the "page tearing" issue. I've had to do some weird contortions to solve that one in my own code and I still get bugs occasionally. The game I'm building right now does almost all of its scene layout and UI as a single graph of components that mix retained and immediate mode, and it's been a relaxing way to do things compared to the 'manually paint widgets in places and do hit testing' approach I've used for some previous titles. A large portion of the UI is constructed via what I'd call 'value replication', where a container control is attached to a list of game objects (entities, components attached to entities, parameters to a script) and then the container automatically creates a list of child controls for each game object automatically. This allows easy virtualization (i.e. only having 20 controls to represent a scrolling view with 1000 items) and means I don't have to manually do a bunch of state synchronization. 1: https://github.com/sq/Libraries/tree/master/Squared/PRGUI https://github.com/sq/Libraries/tree/master/Squared/PRGUI
- 3y ago

cedws 3y ago

ImGui is brilliant. I can highly recommend this hex editor built using it: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

lxe 3y ago

Is there a non-webgpu wasm/emscripten demo somewhere? I remember seeing a ton of them earlier. Or maybe I'm thinking of the rust version: https://github.com/emilk/egui https://github.com/emilk/egui

joeld42 3y ago
There's a bunch here https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples For example, the basic demo window: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-sapp.html https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-sapp.html
ocornut 3y ago
Also see the interactive web manual https://pthom.github.io/imgui_manual_online/manual/imgui_manual.html https://pthom.github.io/imgui_manual_online/manual/imgui_man...

kelvie 3y ago

I've also played around with the Rust version egui, and with the eframe template it's super easy to bang out super quick GUI tools on github pages (for example, I made a basic guitar fretboard chord finder [1] to help me learn guitar in a few hours, plus a few more hours refining it) The mental model of immediate mode guis makes it really easy to work on it as a side project with 10-20 minutes here or there before bed, though doing proper layout to make it look nice is sometimes a challenge. The other advantage is that I can just jump into the implementation, and the egui code itself is pretty easy to grok. [1] https://kelvie.github.io/chord-finder https://kelvie.github.io/chord-finder

kelvie 3y ago
One thing I will add is that this paradigm really encourages either making a ton of functions (which IMO makes code flow harder to read for these kinds of low-effort projects), or having a lot of scoped statements. A good addition would be something like how flutter's LSP-based tools, which I use in Emacs), have a "wrap with widget" auto-refactoring tool, for e.g. when you want to wrap an entire widget tree in a new layout without having to do it manually.
cristeigabriel 3y ago
Egui is not the "Rust version" of ImGui. There's libraries which allow for ImGui in other languages by applying the hourglass pattern first (making a C api for the C++ api), to allow for the creation of bindings, since most languages support C FFI, and then somebody writes an API in the target language which calls to (and maybe extends) the C api.
- buildartefact 3y ago
  egui is pure rust. It is not a rust binding of ImGUI
  - cristeigabriel 3y ago
    I am aware. I am asserting the distinction there.

dazzawazza 3y ago

I've written video game editors in Win32, MFC, wxWidgets, Fox Toolkit, Qt, Cocoa and Dear ImGUI. I will never use anything other than Dear ImGUI from now on. The explicitness, lack of state, speed of development and maintainability of the code means it wins hands down. Well worth investing your time in and if you are a leader in the games industry well worth supporting financially.

cristeigabriel 3y ago
I believe you mean the (general) transparency of state? But yes, that's quite great when you're getting stuff together quickly. It's even used for more serious stuff, where immediate mode is a necessity.
- mort96 3y ago
  The "lack of state" refers to being immediate mode rather than retained mode.
  - cristeigabriel 3y ago
    It does require some state in the back for everything to work as it does.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Of course. The API is stateless but the implementation isn't. That's usually how good immediate mode APIs work.
      - prewett 3y ago
        Dear ImGUI is just retained mode under the hood, with the name of the widget acting as the index. The API presents immediate mode, but it isn't really. If a "good" immediate mode API just hides all the state under the hood, then I think one should call it something other than immediate mode. The thing is, immediate mode UIs are not really usable, because a widget needs internal state, so a pure immediate mode UI would require the caller to carry around all that state. Obviously that is burdensome, which is why Dear ImGUI hides it for you. But in my opinion, it's a bit of a fraud to call that an immediate mode UI, when it retains a copy of state behind its back.

oddthink 3y ago

Is the selling point for this easier custom widgets than in other frameworks? Maybe my standards are too low, but for quick internal tools, it's hard to beat 30-year-old Tcl+Tk.

slabity 3y ago
The selling point is described quite well under "The Pitch" section of the README. Unlike most other toolkits, this one doesn't actually handle its own rendering/contexts. It outputs the low-level vertex buffers and textures that you can pull into your own graphics pipeline. Which means you can integrate it into any sort of 3d application or backend that you want.

soulbadguy 3y ago

Naive question from someone who hasn't touched GUI programming since visual studio/QT GUI designer circa 2005 : Isn't a more declarative approached like XAML/QML (or even html/ccs) a better way to represent a GUI interface as opposed to an imperative list of command embedded inside the business logic of the application ? How does IMGUI handle theming, reflow or even GPU acceleration on different platform ? It seems to me that a more declarive representation would allow for better tooling and easier split between presentation and themes to match the native platform.

flohofwoe 3y ago
Dear ImGui code actually looks quite declarative, except that the actions are directly 'inlined' into the UI declaration as code. For instance: if (ImGui::Button("Click Me")) { // do the stuff that should happen when the button is clicked } To hide a part of the UI you simply skip the code which describes that part of the UI. if (!btnHidden) { if (ImGui::Button("Click Me")) { ... } } Your code describes what the UI should look like in the current frame, and what should happen on user interactions, but without event listeners or callback functions. How you keep the UI declaration separate from the "business logic" is up to you. Dear ImGui allows very close coupling (which quite often is actually an advantage for adhoc UIs), or you can keep both separated as much as you prefer. > How does IMGUI handle theming, reflow or even GPU acceleration on different platform ? Dear ImGui actually builds an internal "stateful" representation of the UI declaration (it needs to remember at least some state between frames, otherwise simple features like moveable/sizeable windows wouldn't be possible) and then generates an optimized list of rendering commands that plug almost directly into 3D rendering APIs like D3D, Metal, GL etc... (the renderer is implemented outside of Dear ImGui by yourself, however Dear ImGui also comes with pluggable example renderers and window system glue for pretty much any platform and 3D API). Themeing/skinning is indeed a weak point of Dear ImGui specifically, other immediate mode UI frameworks like Nuklear offer more flexibility there, but this has nothing to do with the imgui philosophy, only with feature sets of specific imgui libraries.
msk-lywenn 3y ago
Are you asking about the IMGUI paradigm or DearIMGUI the library? In the case of DearIMGUI: - it does not handle theming (but forks do) - I don't know what reflow is - in a way, GPU acceleration is the default. In fact, DearIMGUI doesn't handle anything at all in that regards because it doesn't have to. You are the one responsible for drawing, DearIMGUI just outputs you a vertex buffer that you send to the GPU the way you want to. There are proposed backends but you can totally roll your own. People even have made networked and web backends. I don't know how those work.

Thaxll 3y ago

I worked at multiple major video games studio and they all used ImGui internally, most of the time it was for debug in-game ui.

jckl 3y ago

In school, another student and I used ImGui for a music sampler. In retrospect it could have a more friendly interface heh. https://github.com/EmissionControl2/EmissionControl2 https://github.com/EmissionControl2/EmissionControl2

rollcat 3y ago
Arguably music/"creativity" apps is exactly where immediate mode GUIs shine the most. Predictable latency, instant feedback, ease of mapping the state to a visual representation, reliability and robustness. I can't think of a better match.

rossant 3y ago

An incredibly powerful GUI library. Not easy to use, only for experienced developers. It's quite useful for scientific visualization as well! Many kudos to the main developer and the community.

flohofwoe 3y ago
> Not easy to use, only for experienced developers. Personally I found it a lot easier to grok than (for example) React or Qt (as two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum).

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? Visual Node Graph with ImGui - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702059 - Sept 2023 (90 comments) ImPlot: Interactive plotting library, ImGui style - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000594 - Aug 2023 (39 comments) ImGUI Ported to a LiteX SoC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540206 - Jan 2023 (12 comments) Show HN: ImThemes – a Dear ImGui theme browser and editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32290700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32290700 - July 2022 (1 comment) Show HN: Python Live GUI – A Hybrid of Dear ImGUI and Phoenix LiveView - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679945 - June 2022 (19 comments) Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24986908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24986908 - Nov 2020 (180 comments) ImPlot: Advanced 2D Plotting for Dear ImGui - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23128262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23128262 - May 2020 (6 comments) Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Immediate Mode GUI for C++ with minimal dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23065472 - May 2020 (1 comment) Runtime Compiled C++ Dear ImGui and DirectX11 Tutorial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22233109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22233109 - Feb 2020 (12 comments) Could ImGUI Be the Future of GUIs? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745809 - April 2019 (124 comments) Immediate Mode GUI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744513 - April 2019 (128 comments) ImGui: Bloat-Free Immediate Mode GUI for C++ with Minimal Dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121600 - Oct 2018 (1 comment) ImGui: Bloat-Free Immediate Mode Graphical UI for C++ with Minimal Dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16193560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16193560 - Jan 2018 (1 comment) Using ImGui with modern C++ and STL for creating game dev tools – Part 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12148661 - July 2016 (33 comments) Imgui: Immediate Mode Graphical User Interface with minimal dependencies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161601 - Aug 2014 (41 comments) Sol on Immediate Mode GUIs (IMGUI) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4201748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4201748 - July 2012 (15 comments)