libui: a portable GUI library for C

This README is being written.

Announcements

• 24 May 2016

  • You can now help choose a potential new build system for libui.
  • Tomorrow I will decide if OS X 10.7 will also be dropped alongside GTK+ 3.4-3.8 this Saturday. Stay tuned.

• 22 May 2016

  • Two more open questions I'd like your feedback on are available here and here.
  • Sometime in the next 48 hours (before 23:59 EDT on 24 May 2016) I will split uiCombobox into two separate controls, uiCombobox and uiEditableCombobox, each with slightly different events and "selected item" mechanics. Prepare your existing code.

• 21 May 2016

  • I will now post announcements and updates here.
  • Now that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is here, no earlier than next Saturday, 28 May 2016 at noon EDT, I will bump the minimum GTK+ version from 3.4 to 3.10. This will add a lot of new features that I can now add to libui, such as search-oriented uiEntries, lists of arbitrary control layouts, and more. If you are still running a Linux distribution that doesn't come with 3.10, you will either need to upgrade or use jhbuild to set up a newer version of GTK+ in a private environment.
  • You can decide if I should also drop OS X 10.7 here.

Updates

Note that today's entry may be updated later today.

• 29 May 2016

  • Thanks to @pcwalton, we can now statically link libui! Simply do make STATIC=1 instead of just make.
    • On Windows you must link both libui.lib and libui.res AND provide a Common Controls 6 manifest for output static binaries to work properly.

• 28 May 2016

  • As promised, the minimum system requirements are now OS X 10.8 and GTK+ 3.10 for OS X and Unix, respectively.

• 26 May 2016

  • Two OS X-specific functions have been added: uiDarwinMarginAmount() and uiDarwinPaddingAmount(). These return the amount of margins and padding, respectively, to give to a control, and are intended for container implementations. These are suitable for the constant of a NSLayoutConstraint. They both take a pointer parameter that is reserved for future use and should be NULL.

• 25 May 2016

  • uiDrawTextLayout attributes are now specified in units of graphemes on all platforms. This means characters as seen from a user's perspective, not Unicode codepoints or UTF-8 bytes. So a long string of combining marker codepoints after one codepoint would still count as one grapheme.

• 24 May 2016

  • As promised, uiCombobox is now split into uiCombobox for non-editable comboboxes and uiEditableCombobox for editable comboboxes. Mind the function changes as well :)
  • There is a new function uiMainStep(), which runs one iteration of the main loop. It takes a single boolean argument, indicating whether to wait for an event to occur or not. It returns true if an event was processed (or if no event is available if you don't want to wait) and false if the event loop was told to stop (for instance, uiQuit() was called).

• 23 May 2016

  • Fixed surrogate pair drawing on OS X.

• 22 May 2016

  • Removed uiControlVerifyDestroy(); that is now part of uiFreeControl() itself.
  • Added uiPi, a constant for π. This is provided for C and C++ programmers, where there is no standard named constant for π; bindings authors shouldn't need to worry about this.
  • Fixed uiMultilineEntry not properly having line breaks on Windows.
  • Added uiNewNonWrappingMultilineEntry(), which creates a uiMultilineEntry that scrolls horizontally instead of wrapping lines. (This is not documented as being changeable after the fact on Windows, hence it's a creation-time choice.)
  • uiAreas on Windows and some internal Direct2D areas now respond to WM_PRINTCLIENT properly, which should hopefully increase the quality of screenshots.
  • uiDateTimePicker on GTK+ works properly on RTL layouts and no longer disappears off the bottom of the screen if not enough room is available. It will also no longer be marked for localization of the time format (what the separator should be and whether to use 24-hour time), as that information is not provided by the locale system. :(
  • Added uiUserBugCannotSetParentOnToplevel(), which should be used by implementations of toplevel controls in their SetParent() implementations. This will also be the beginning of consolidating common user bug messages into a single place, though this will be one of the only few exported user bug functions.
  • uiSpinbox and uiSlider now merely swap their min and max if min ≥ max. They will no longer panic and do nothing, respectively.
  • Matrix scaling will no longer leave the matrix in an invalid state on OS X and GTK+.
  • uiMultilineEntrySetText() and uiMutlilineEntryAppend() on GTK+ no longer fire OnChanged() events.

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:
  • GNU make 3.81 or newer (Xcode comes with this; on Windows you will need to get it yourself)
• Windows: Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 or newer (2013 is needed for va_copy())
  • MinGW is currently unsupported. MinGW-w64 support will be re-added once the following features come in:
    • Isolation awareness
    • Linker symbols for some functions such as TaskDialog() (which I thought I submitted...)
• Unix: nothing specific
• Mac OS X: nothing specific, so long as you can build Cocoa programs

(TODO write some notes on make variables and cross-compiling)

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
Haskell	libui-haskell
JavaScript	libui.js (merged into libui-node?)
Julia	Libui.jl
Lua	libuilua, libui-lua
Node.js	libui-node
Python	pylibui
Ruby	libui-ruby
Rust	libui-rs

Screenshots

From examples/controlgallery: