NOTE: Microraptor gui is discontinued, see ctx for the successor UI architecture experiments by its author.
Explorations of alternative means of interactive user interfaces. Incrementally augment the cairo API with interactivity and CSS powered text-layout. This permits interesting ability to experiment with the alternate mental model to create user interafaces in, most other frameworks are retained mode - like motif, gtk, qt, clutter, svg/html DOM -
environment built using the framework, including: a shell/host for client programs, a terminal emulator, file browser and text editor written using the library.
Features:
- SDL/GTK/framebuffer/terminal backends.
- PNG/JPG image caching
microraptor gui is a C API for creating user interfaces, it can be used as an application writing environment or as an interactive canvas for part of a larger interface.
Micro raptor builds on/integrates with cairos immediate mode vector rendering API
Callbacks registered during the painting of the frame - the cairo transformations in place during registration applies when called. Also works for dragging. Keybindings are also registered in the same callback for building the ui. Thus the mental model is that one - in one call - repaint/recreate the UI drawing and callbacks from data-state and view-state in one call, avoiding much caching and intermediate objects.
Embeddable and stand-alone - as a "canvas" mrg can be used as widgets in Gtk+ applications or full-blown applications.
CSS styled rendering (using a context stack; where the pushing of contexts specifies the "element.class#id" of each now element rendering entered.
MicroRaptor Gui has three independent backends it can use: SDL-1.2, GTK+-3.0 and ANSI/vt100 terminals.
The GTK backend provides both full application hosting, and a widget for use as a canvas in GTK+applications. The terminal backends has mouse support, is utf8 native and for simple text-centric applications you can even build static libraries skipping even the cairo support.
Clone both mrg and mmm (from neighboring git locations), and have alsa, SDL-1.2 and GTK+-3.0 development packages installed.`
$ meson build
$ cd build
build$ ninja
build$ ninja install
in first mmm and then mrg shouler permit running:
$ mmm.sdl mrg /home/foo/..path/to/sources/of/mrg/docs/31-hello.c
To start a slide-show of source code that is live compiled and run as interactive demos within the viewer, navigate forward/back with F12 and F11. Prefixing mrg with mmm.sdl uses the mmm SDL host instead of the autodetected GTK+ backend for microraptor, using GTK there is timing/update issues likely related to mainloop integration issues.
$ mrg host
Launches a window manager/compositor host for mmm clients, which mrg applications are.
$ mrg browser mrg:index.html
Launches the mrg XHTML+CSS renderer on a static HTML/CSS data set contained in the mrg binary.
$ mrg edit <textfile>
Launches the editor on the text file.
All of the mrg C API maps easily to lua when using luajit ffi, binds easily
with luajit ffi. See the ./luajit dir for an example, that also bundles the
needed cairo bindings.
Microraptor can use GTK as a backend or microraptor can be used in GTK+
applications, when used in gtk applications in widgets it is better to rely on
native mainloop integration with g_timeout and g_idle instead of similar library functionality provided by microraptor gui.
In terms of programming paradigm, microraptor contains aspects of both traditional retained widget-tree/scene-graph ui's and purist immediate mode uis. Since microraptor doesn't have a retained scenegraph, and some of the freedoms gained with imgui, like being able to paint incrementally directly from data-structures and free form logic to structure things.