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Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

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11–20 of 186 posts

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#12
Dear ImGui is excellent and is very handy to make GUI version of a CLI app especially if we want to interactively set values and see results.

It is fairly low level (deliberately) and that’s great to keep it simple. I wish there is a standalone GUI ‘framework’ which builds on these primitives and leans on standard library to make the experience a bit more nicer when building standalone applications.

I understand this is not the goal of Dear ImGui. I may give it a shot in a few months time if I don’t come across any such project.

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#13
post #3

Happy to see ImGui trend here on HN! It is an amazing tool that is used in a lot of game engines for making internal/dev gui:s. The principle of drawing gui "as you go", interleaved with control flow makes it easier+faster to make gui:s. In our company's main app we use ImGui (with customizations) for all gui work (from C++ and Rust).

I work at one of the largest games publishers out there and I'm pretty sure ImGUI is integrated into all of our games at this point during development for debugging. It's an absolutely fantastic tool. Oh, we do actually sponsor it: https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/ubisoft-sponsors-user-interf...

Nice :) Will you use it for user-facing gui:s, looking forward?

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#15
One of the most valuable parts of Dear Imgui is the example applications, which are great as a reference and starting point for your own projects. Many different platforms and rendering APIs are covered.

Also be sure to check out the 'docking' branch, which implements docking panels and tearaway windows in the style of Visual Studio. There are many low quality versions of this concept in other GUI libraries but I think Dear Imgui's version is the best I've seen outside of Visual Studio itself.

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at one of the largest games publishers out there and I'm pretty sure ImGUI is integrated into all of our games at this point during development for debugging. It's an absolutely fantastic tool. Oh, we do actually sponsor it: https://montreal.ubisoft.com/en/ubisoft-sponsors-user-interf...

Nice :) Will you use it for user-facing gui:s, looking forward?

Very unlikely, I don't really see why we would. All of our engines have their own extensive UI tools that can be used to create rudimentary interface very quickly if needed. Maybe if we ever released like a level editor or something, but I'm not aware of any such thing right now.

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#17
post #14

Qt seems to be the most popular library for cross-platform GUI apps written in C++. Is Dear ImGui a credible alternative? How does Dear ImGui compare to Qt?

Well, these are as different as it gets. Dear ImGui is purely code based and it's drawing in immediate mode. Meaning there is no way to have a visual tool to arrange layouts for things, you have to do everything in code. It's fantastic for debugging, prototyping, very simple interfaces when that's all that's required, but it's not a fully fledged UI library like QT. It's like comparing a bicycle to a 4x4. Sure a bicycle works better in some uses cases, but for it's not designed for heavy lifting.

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#18
post #7

Not sure why this is showing up on HN today. But Dear ImGui is absolutely amazing. And its not just for C++. I use it myself in my C# game engine. (There's a C# port that uses System.Numerics: https://github.com/mellinoe/ImGui.NET ) which I've ported to MonoGame https://github.com/roy-t/ImGui.NET ) I've used a lot of different UI frameworks (winforms, WPF, Html/CSS based frameworks, custom game engine frameworks). Bu…

The Dear ImGui C++ API also maps very well to C, so well that I actually prefer the C-API when working on a project that's mostly C (instead of using C++ for the UI code and C for everything else as I did before). AFAIK most of the other language bindings are also based on the C-API (which is autogenerated from the C++ API):

https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#19
post #9

>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 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 situat…

the owner is french, I bet the french "cher imgui" reads better.
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