go-flutter - A package that brings Flutter to the desktop

Purpose

Flutter allows you to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.

This unofficial project brings Flutter to the desktop through the power of Go and GLFW.

The flutter engine itself doesn't know how to deal with desktop platforms (eg handling mouse/keyboard input). Instead, it exposes an abstraction layer for whatever platform to implement. This project implements the Flutter's Embedding API using a single code base that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For rendering, GLFW fits the job because it provides the right abstractions over the OpenGL's Buffer/Mouse/Keyboard for each platform.

The choice of Golang comes from the fact that it has the same tooling on every platform. Plus Golang is a great language because it keeps everything simple and readable, which makes it easy to build cross-platform plugins.

Getting started

The best way to get started is to install hover, the official go-flutter tool to set up, build and run Flutter apps on the desktop, including hot-reload.

Read the hover tutorial to run your app on the desktop, or start with one of our example apps.

If you want more in-depth information about go-flutter, read the wiki.

Supported features

Linux 🐧
MacOS 🍎
Windows 🏁
Hot Reload
Plugin system
- BinaryMessageCodec, BinaryMessageChannel
- StandardMessageCodec, JSONMessageCodec
- StandardMethodCodec, MethodChannel
Plugin detection for supported plugins
Importable as Go library into custom projects
UTF-8 Text input
Clipboard copy & paste
Window title and icon
Standard keyboard shortcuts
- ctrl-c ctrl-v ctrl-x ctrl-a
- Home End shift-Home shift-End
- Left ctrl-Left ctrl-shift-Left
- Right ctrl-Right ctrl-shift-Right
- Backspace ctrl-Backspace Delete
Mouse-over/hovering
Mouse-buttons
RawKeyboard events
Distribution format (windows-msi, mac-dmg, linux-appimage, and more)
Cross-compiling using docker 🐳

Are you missing a feature? Open an issue!

Examples

A separate repository contains example Flutter apps that also run on the desktop. Go to github.com/go-flutter-desktop/examples to give them a try.

Plugins

Some popular plugins are already implemented over at github.com/go-flutter-desktop/plugins. If you have implemented a plugin that you would like to share, feel free to open a PR on the plugins repository!

For a detailed tutorial on how to create a plugin, read the wiki.

Version compatibility

Flutter version

Flutter itself is a relatively young project. Its framework and engine are updated often. The go-flutter project tries to stay compatible with the beta channel of Flutter.