libui-node

libui Node.js bindings.

libui is a simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.

It is in early stage of development, but is evolving at great pace and is really awesome.

It could become an awesome, lightweight alternative to Electron to develop multiplatform GUI.

Linux

macOS

Windows

Supported platform

Windows: Windows Vista SP2 with Platform Update or newer
Unix: GTK+ 3.10 or newer
Mac OS X: OS X 10.8 or newer

Node version requirement

The project run on any node version > 0.12.

Installation

We had published a first pre-release to npm. You can now install libui-node as a simple dependency in your project:

npm install -S libui-node

libui prebuilt binaries are automatically downloaded after install.

This is tested with:

Linux 64bit
Linux 32bit
Windows 64bit
macOS

If you get error on windows, check this node-gyp issue

Documentation

You can find ongoing documentation in docs folder.

Please look in examples folder for working examples.

Some example uses ES6 syntax. We will soon configure babel transpilation for them. Meanwhile, if you are testing the project on Node.js < 6, you can check examples/core-api.js that use ES5 syntax.

Run examples

First, you have to clone the GitHub repo and npm install it:

git clone https://github.com/parro-it/libui-node.git
npm install

Then, to run the control gallery example (requires Node.js >= 6), type:

npm start

For the core api, example, type:

npm run start-core

Project status

All current libui API, except for these ones are implemented.
This is not yet battle-tested in a real app, but the control gallery example you saw in the screenshot above is fully working.

Future directions of the project

This binding is actually implementing low-level API straight to the libui ones. We plan to add another level of API on top of it to simplify GUI building. You can get a taste of how they will be in example utils.js file.

This new API will support transpilation from JSX to further simplify GUI building.

These works will become in future the base for a React-Native like project.

Contribution & design

Each libui widget implementaion is written in it's own C++ file in src folder.
Each widget is implemented in it's own C++ class, each class is a simple wrapper for related libui C functions.
There is an header file called src/ui-node.h that contains all classes definitions.
Widget events does not follow node convention: if you attach an handler to an event, previous one will be overwritten and never be called. This will be resolved on future high-level API repo, where each widget will be an EventEmitter instance.
We build the project using the awesome nbind tool, that automate the process of linking a straight C++ class to Node.js stuff...

Useful NPM scripts

test - run AVA tests && XO linting.
start - start the control gallery example
build - rebuild C++ sources

Related projects

libui - Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.
nbind - Magical headers that make your C++ library accessible from JavaScript