NiGui

NiGui is a cross-platform, desktop GUI toolkit written in Nim.
NiGui provides an easy way to develop applications in Nim with a full-featured graphical user interface.

Target platforms:

• Linux over GTK+ 3
• Windows (Win32 API)
• macOS (planned)

Design goals:

• Full abstraction
  NiGui provides full abstraction of the underlying platform. NiGui applications are written once and can be compiled for different platforms. Application developers don't have to care about platform-specific details.
• Simple and elegant
  NiGui has a clean and beginner-friendly high-level API. It is much less complex than the Win32 API, GTK+ or Qt.
  NiGui profits of Nim's features and elegance in contrast to C code, for example Nim's polymorphism capabilities.
• Powerful
  NiGui uses the native controls of the underlying platform to give a familiar use and feel for the user. In addtion, NiGui allows to create custom controls for special use cases or a themed UI.
  NiGui has it's own layout manager for automatic resizing and positioning of controls.
• Minimal dependencies
  The NiGui source code has no dependencies except Nim's standard library. Platform bindings are included.
  Generated binaries (exe files) include NiGui and do not need external libraries.

Current state

NiGui is currently work in progress. Very basic things work, many things are missing.

Working:

• Window, Button, Label, TextBox, TextArea
• LayoutContainer (own layout manager)
• Timers
• Message boxes and file dialogs
• Custom controls including scrolling
• Drawing and image processing

WIP:

• Event handling
• Documentation

Planned:

• macOS support
• More widgets

Getting started

Recommended steps to use NiGui:

1. Clone the NiGui repository
2. Add the follwing two include paths to your Nim configuration:

For Linux/Gtk:

--path:"<path_to_nigui>/src/common"
--path:"<path_to_nigui>/src/gtk3"

For Windows:

--path:"<path_to_nigui>/src/common"
--path:"<path_to_nigui>/src/windows"

3. Try the included example programs

Contributing

You can help to improve NiGui by:

• Trying to use it and giving feedback
• Test the programs under different Windows versions or Linux distributions
• Developing show cases
• Help improving and extending the code
• Adding macOS support

Contact: simonkrauter@openmailbox.org

License

NiGui is FLOSS (free and open-source software) licensed under the MIT License. As a result you may use any compatible license (essentially any license) for your own programs developed with NiGui. You are explicitly permitted to develop commercial applications using NiGui.