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andlabs
libui
C2016–2026
andlabs / libui

libui

Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.

51Distinct people
71Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:01:40 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year71 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-05-20 03:29:18 UTC to 2026-03-01 23:33:14 UTC.

01020302016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 27 mentions; 2 submissions, 25 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC27225
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
libui: a portable GUI library for C This README is being written. Status It has come to my attention that I have not been particularly clear about how usable or feature-complete libui is, and that this has fooled many people into expecting more from libui right this moment than I have explicitly promised to make available. I apologize for not doing this sooner. libui is currently mid-alpha software. Much of what is currently present runs stabily enough for the examples and perhaps some small programs to work, but the stability is still a work-in-progress, much of what is already there is not feature-complete, some of it will be buggy on certain platforms, and there's a lot of stuff missing. In short, here's a list of features that I would like to add to libui, but that aren't in yet: trees clipboard support, including drag and drop more and better dialogs printing accessibility for uiArea and custom controls document-based programs tighter OS integration (especially for document-based programs), to allow programs to fully feel native, rather than merely look and act native better support for standard dialogs and features (search bars, etc.) OpenGL support In addition, here is a list of issues generalizing existing problems. Furthermore, libui is not properly fully documented yet. This is mainly due to the fact that the API was initially unstable enough so as to result in rewriting documentation multiple times, in addition to me not being happy with really any existing C code documentation tool. That being said, I have started to pin down my ideal code documentation style in parts of ui.h, most notably in the uiAttributedString APIs. Over time, I plan on extending this to the rest of the headers. You can also use the documentation for libui's Go bindings as a reference, though it is somewhat stale and not optimally written. But libui is not dead; I am working on it whenever I can, and I hope to get it to a point of real quality soon! News Note that today's entry (Eastern Time) may be updated later today. 7 April 2019 The build system has been switched to Meson. See below for instructions. This change was made because the previous build system, CMake, caused countless headaches over trivial issues. Meson was chosen due to how unproblematic setting up libui's build just right was, as well as having design goals that are by coincidence closely aligned with what libui wants. Travis CI has been replaced with Azure Pipelines and much of the AppVeyor CI configuration was integrated into the Azure Pipelines configuration. This shouldn't affect most developers. 1 September 2018 Alpha 4.1 is here. This is an emergency fix to Alpha 4 to fix uiImageAppend() not working as documented. It now works properly, with one important difference you'll need to care about: it now requires image data to be alpha-premultiplied. In addition, uiImage also is implemented slightly more nicely now, and ui.h has minor documentation typo fixes. Alpha 4.1 also tries to make everything properly PIC-enabled. 10 August 2018 Alpha 4 is finally here. Everything from Alpha 3.5 and what's listed below is in this release; the two biggest changes are still the new text drawing API and new uiTable control. In between all that is a whole bunch of bugfixes, and hopefully more stability too. Thanks to everybody who helped contribute! Alpha 4 should hopefully also include automated binary releases via CI. Thanks to those who helped set that up! 8 August 2018 Finally introduced an API for loading images, uiImage, and a new control, uiTable, for displaying tabular data. These provide enough basic functionality for now, but will be improved over time. You can read the documentation for the new features as they are here. Thanks to everyone who helped get to this point, in particular @bcampbell for the initial Windows code, and to everyone else for their patience! 30 May 2018 Merged the previous Announcements and Updates section of this README into a single News section, and merged the respective archive files into a single NEWS.md file. 16 May 2018 Thanks to @parro-it and @msink, libui now has better CI, including AppVeyor for Windows CI, and automated creation of binary releases when I make a tagged release. 13 May 2018 Added new functions to work with uiDateTimePickers: uiDateTimePickerTime(), uiDateTimePickerSetTime(), and uiDateTimePickerOnChanged(). These operate on standard <time.h> struct tms. Thanks @cody271! Release builds on Windows with MSVC should be fixed now; thanks @l0calh05t, @slahn, @mischnic, and @zentner-kyle. 12 May 2018 GTK+ and OS X now have a cleaner build process for static libraries which no longer has intermediate files and differing configurations. As a result, certain issues should no longer be present. New naming rules for internal symbols of libui have also started being drafted; runtime symbols and edge cases still need to be handled (and the rules applied to Windows) before this can become a regular thing. 2 May 2018 On Windows, you no longer need to carry around a libui.res file with static builds. You do need to link in the appropriate manifest file, such as the one in the windows/ folder (I still need to figure out exactly what is needed apart from the Common Controls v6 dependency, or at least to create a complete-ish template), or at least include it alongside your executables. This also means you should no longer see random cmake errors when building the static libraries. 18 April 2018 Introduced a new uiTimer() function for running code on a timer on the main thread. (Thanks to @cody271.) Migrated all code in the common/ directory to use uipriv prefixes for everything that isn't static. This is the first step toward fixing static library oddities within libui, allowing libui to truly be safely used as either a static library or a shared library. 18 March 2018 Introduced an all-new formatted text API that allows you to process formatted text in ways tha
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

14 sources
> Not to mention the sad state of UI toolkits right now. This isn't about GTK vs. Qt or anything... but you can't pick up your favourite language (Python, JS, whatever) and easily write cross-platform apps that work well on Linux. This frustrates me to no end. - Qt is almost impossible to fully bind. The vague hacks we had all got tossed out the windows with the move from Qt4 to Qt5. I've given up putting my own effort in here. - GTK had some good progress with gobject introspection, but it's like talking to a brick wall trying to get issues fixed. Not to mention that it doesn't work as well as other toolkits on other platforms, and I dislike their new "look". - wxWidgets is very hard to bind well. - Motif never "feels" right - IUP is sort of a dark horse, but I've never managed to build a nicely working application in it, and the build p
Read the rest
rocess is a nightmare (though it has improved). Not to mention that each toolkit ends up trying to push their own weird languages and ui designer IDEs. At the moment I'm crossing my fingers that libui https://github.com/andlabs/libui/ won't mess up. But for now it's quite incomplete.
In LXQt 0.11 Released
IUP[0] has not been menthioned. IUP is wrapper for gtk+, motif and win32. Pros: * really simple api * native toolkit * c api, so other languages can easily write binding for it Cons: * controlls(widgets) are limited * cocoa(mac) is not supported {they suggest to use gtk instead} * documentation is spotty * nobody is using? (I believe no linux distros have it in repository) somebody here menthioned libui[1], it is exactlly the same philosophy [0]http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/ [1]https://github.com/andlabs/libui
In Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?
libui [1] is a promising new cross platform GUI toolkit. If I need a GUI for a small cross platform desktop app, I will definitely try it. It uses MIT license, which means there is less headache for commercial applications. It is also more lightweight. I have always felt that Qt has a lot of unnecessary classes. libui has C api, but it would be easy to write a nice c++11 wrapper around it. [1] https://github.com/andlabs/libui
In Qt 5.7 released
You are correct. The only serious frameworks nowadays are Qt or Electron if you're targeting the cross-platform desktop. There's also wxwidgets, although its python 3 bindings are still being built. Personally, I'm keeping my eye open on libui (https://github.com/andlabs/libui/) as it is already possible to do some basic things with it. However, it is pretty much in alpha state and I'm slowly writing the Python bindings for it at https://github.com/joaoventura/pylibui/. The thing that I like in the libui is that it is a thin wrapper around platform specific frameworks. Therefore, the library is very small (some 340 KB) and it's as native as the underlying platform calls are.. Regarding Electron, I am writing an application on it, but it is too god damn heavy in terms of memory, disk space and boot time, and web front-end development is ab
Read the rest
solute chaos these days. Although I'm currently writing my app on it, it is mostly an MVP as I want to make pylibui/libui usable enough to switch to a pure desktop cross-platform library asap..
In Announcing the Qt Automotive Suite
It took a while to find the "getting started" page: https://github.com/futurice/pepperoni-app-kit/blob/master/do... Ultimately, I'm rooting for libui[1] over React Native or anything related to it. But the more competition, the better, since competition seems to usually drive innovation. You know, it's kind of funny how we've come full circle. 15-20 years ago, developers were experimenting with all sorts of new GUI ideas. I remember using a program that had something that looked like scrollbars, but the mouse's scroll-wheel wouldn't work on them, and you couldn't drag them either, you could only scroll by clicking the arrow buttons on the top and bottom. But man, it looked super sleek, like it came straight out of the movie Aliens or something! And now we're doing the same thing. Reinventing GUI so that it's pretty, but ends up being brok
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en. I wish I could find that one tweet from a year ago or so, where someone said that scrolling a certain web page triggered no less than something like 67 animations. [1] https://github.com/andlabs/libui
In Pepperoni – A framework to build apps faster, powered by React Native

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