WebUI

WebUI is not a web-server solution or a framework, but it allows you to use any web browser as a GUI, with Nim in the backend and HTML5 in the frontend. All in a lightweight portable lib.

Nim wrapper and bindings for WebUI, a fully independent and cross-platform web UI library.

Instead of using a third-party library, WebUI instead uses a pre-installed browser (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, or Safari). So, there's no need for any large SDK or library for development/production, all you need is a web browser!

⚠️ Notice:

WebUI is not a web-server solution or a framework, but it's an lightweight portable lib to use any installed web browser as a user interface.

WebUI's documentation is not finished.

Features

Fully Independent (No need for any third-party library)
Lightweight (~600 Kb (300 Kb when compiling with DLL)) & Small memory footprint
Fast binary communication protocol between WebUI and the browser (Instead of JSON)
Multi-platform & Multi-Browser
Using private profile for safety

Screenshot

This text editor example is written in Nim using WebUI as the GUI library.

Installation

Install via Nimble:

nimble install webui

Documentation

Online documentation can be found here:

https://webui.me/docs/2.4.0/#/nim_api
https://neroist.github.io/webui-docs/ (same thing but made in nimib)

There isn't much documentation as of right now, so I suggest to get started using some examples or WebUI's own examples or documentation.

Heres a very minimal example of using the wrapper:

import webui

let window = newWindow() # Create a new Window
window.show("<html>Hello</html>") # Show the window with html content

wait() # Wait until the window gets closed

Examples

Examples can be found here at examples/.

If you're trying to run the examples remember to clone the repository recursively, as it depends on the WebUI repo as a submodule. Here's the command to do so for the truly lazy:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/neroist/webui.git

Bindings and Wrapper

The Nim library exposes two files: webui.nim and webui/bindings.nim. webui/bindings.nim are low-level bindings for WebUI, generated by c2nim. webui.nim is a high-level wrapper for WebUI, using native Nim types and avoiding pointers.

The wrapper and bindings also allow to to control whether or not to statically compile WebUI's C sources into your application, compile with a static library, or to depend on a DLL. Static compilation is the default behavior.

To compile with a static library, pass -d:useWebviewStaticLib or -d:useWebviewStaticLibrary to the Nim compiler. To depend on a DLL, pass -d:useWebviewDll instead. If neither of these flags are passed to the Nim compiler, static compilation will take place instead. Static libraries and DLLs can be found in WebUI's website here.

In addition, you can also enable WebUI's logging via -d:webuiLog but that flag only works for static compilation.

Supported Web Browsers

Browser	Windows	macOS	Linux
Mozilla Firefox	✔️	✔️	✔️
Google Chrome	✔️	✔️	✔️
Microsoft Edge	✔️	✔️	✔️
Chromium	✔️	✔️	✔️
Yandex	✔️	✔️	✔️
Brave	✔️	✔️	✔️
Vivaldi	✔️	✔️	✔️
Epic	✔️	✔️	not available
Apple Safari	not available	coming soon	not available
Opera	coming soon	coming soon	coming soon

License

MIT License. See LICENSE

Original WebUI library is licensed under MIT. See LICENSE.

bryanchance/nim-webui