imgui

I finally dipped into using ImHex when doing some reversing of the PS2 memory card format for https://ps2iodb.com. The program is so good, and has enough of a reputation that I knew to reach for it even though I know nothing about reversing, and that was 3-4 years ago now! Also shoutout to the awesome GUI library is uses; https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

It is a shame that Spotify have not made their Dear ImGui-based version available: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/3075#issuecomment-60...

Agreed. This is exactly what I want, ideally with components and libraries and panels and data shareable and extendable between applications. The closest in spirit is Probably something like Dear ImGui[0] and the ecosystem of components and apps built with it, but it's not quite there for me. Something is missing. [0] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

If you compare the code using the presented framework to code using say immediate mode library like ImGui[1][2] for example, the presented framework does indeed seem to be exposing a retained mode API. [1]: https://pthom.github.io/imgui_explorer/ [2]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

> Literally none of the examples of large companies using it in the comment I replied to are game companies or using it for game debug menus. Literally all of them are using it as part of non-user-facing debug tools for 3D graphics: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Software-using-dear-im... Meta as part of their VR/gaming division, Google in their VR division and 3D rendering engine, Ikea in a 3D material editor, and Intel in a 3D SDK. And again, the intended use is immediately explained on the project repo no matter what the comment you were replying to said.

No. As much as I would like it to be the case, that is most certainly a poor criteria to evaluate a UI library. Dear ImGui [0] is without a doubt the most prevalent immediate mode UI library. It does not have native accessibility features, but that hasn't stopped companies such as Intel, Meta, IKEA and Google from shipping products built upon it. It's also used in a ton of games. Calling Dear ImGui a toy project at this point would be like calling Unreal Engine a toy project. It's a shame accessibility support is not more widespread, and furthermore it's a shame that it is so laborious to add it. 0: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/

I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries. It's had no problems loading and playing mp3s and m4as, which is the majority of my collection. I'll probably prototype an music manager off of that. It'd be great if it works out for Android as well.

My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users. Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this. Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work. So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc. I've been thinking on and off for a few years

re, iteration: Have you encountered ImGui [0]? It's basically standard when prototyping any sort of graphical application. re, GUIs in statically typed languages: As you might expect, folks typically use a library. See Unreal Engine, raylib, godot, qt, etc. Sans that, any sort of 2D graphics library can get the job done with a little work. You might also take a look at SwiftUI if you have an Apple device. [0]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

I read that article a while ago and highly enjoyed it. C# truly has become a very good language for game development and since NativeAOT has become a thing, we will less and less rely on hacks like IL2CPP or BRUTE which transpile the C# IL to C++ such that it can run on JIT restricted platforms like consoles or iOS. I'd really love to go all-in with C# and SDL3 to make an engine-less cross-platform game but I still miss a good way to make complex game UIs without doing everything from scratch. Does anyone have a good suggestion for making non-trivial game UIs without using a full game engine? So far, I only found https://github.com/vchelaru/Gum and https://github.com/mikke89/RmlUi but I think there's not really something super mature and feature packed, or is there? I'm aware of https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, as the article also mentio

Here's an informative explanation in the DearImgui library which chose this approach. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...

You're clearly well-traveled, but it's unfortunate that none of the frameworks you listed follow the only UI paradigm I actually find enjoyable to work with. Look Immediate Mode UIs when you have some time to kill. It's a famous paradigm in videogame UI development, so unfortunately most publicly available IMGUI libraries are tailored for use in game engine editor tooling (not very style-able, simple layout algorithms and assumption that they're running in a 60FPS loop), but they're still a good place to look at, to get a general idea. The most famous library is Dear ImGui [1] The biggest advantage of the immediate mode approach is that you get UI/state syncing for free without having to manage any callbacks/getters/setters/magic properties. It introduces new problems (widgets are now defined implicitly and you need a system for keeping t

> Many immediate mode UIs fail badly here, never going to idle even if nothing is happening ImGui's author deliberately doesn't fix this because this is one of the main issues preventing ImGui to be widely adopted on desktop potentially attracting too many users at once but lacking support for all of them. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/7892#issuecomment-22...

I always point to the Metal-API debugger in Xcode for what I'd want a CPU debugger to look like, visualizing dependencies and dataflows with an actual graphical UI, letting me view data as something else than just hex dumps (e.g. as image or 3D mesh), etc... etc... Of course the CPU side usually lacks semantics to automatically create data visualizations (while modern 3D APIs have enough context to figure out data dependencies and data formats), and that would be the "interesting" part to solve - e.g. how to tunnel richer debug information from the programming language to the debugger. Also there's a middle ground of directly adding a realtime runtime debugging UI to applications via something like Dear Imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/) which is at least extremely popular in game development - and in this case it's trivial to prov