dardan_ui

dardan_ui is a simple GUI Toolkit based on SDL2. The library should be simple to use and be similar to a GUI Toolkit of an OO language.

Why am I creating this library?

• I have started learning Rust, and this seems like a good project to improve my skills
• The gui libraries that exist for now (AFAIK) are complex, complicated or need to be run as a server.
• (Subjective) The other libraries are not intuitive.
• (Subjective) Creating custom ui elements in other libraries is complicated.

How to use (goal)

This is how I intend for the ibrary to e used when it is done. Here are some simple use cases, but the idea is not complete yet.

Simple Ui Application:

This is what you need to run an application, which seems pretty simple

extern crate dardan_ui;

use dardan_ui::UiApp;

pub fn main() {
    UiApp::new().run();
}

Responsive window with sidebar:

extern crate dardan_ui;

use std::rc::Rc;
use std::cell::RefCell;

use dardan_ui::{UiApp, UiColor, UiPair, UiRelSize, UiUnit};
use dardan_ui::combos::UiRowCombo;

pub fn main() {
    let mut app = UiApp::new();

    let mut main_container = UiRowCombo::new();

    let mut sidebar = UiRowCombo::new();
    sidebar.set_background_color(UiColor::salmon());
    main_container.add_child(UiRelSize::Px(200), Rc::new(RefCell::new(sidebar)));

    let mut sector = UiRowCombo::new();
    sector.set_background_color(UiColor::red());
    main_container.add_child(UiRelSize::Max, Rc::new(RefCell::new(sector)));

    app.set_main_element(Rc::new(RefCell::new(main_container)));

    app.run();
}

Even though this isn't that hard to understand, this doesn't seem that simple. By using macros it could look like this:

extern crate dardan_ui;

ui!( 
    define UiRowCombo : main_container {
        children : [
            UiRowCombo : sidebar {
                size_x : 200 px,
                size_y : Max,
                background_color : salmon
            },
            UiRowCombo : sector {
                size_x : Max,
                size_y : Max,
                background_color : red
            }
        ]
    }
);

pub fn main() {
    let mut app = UiApp::new();

    ui!(set_main app main_container);
    
    app.run();
}

And if we don't want to specify anything in main, then we could replace the whole main function with ui![run main_container]

Contribute

Because this is my first project in rust, there will be a lot of mistakes and a lot of things you could improve on. Some of them are:

• Rust best-practices (My first time programming in Rust)
• Better use of SDL2 and improvments (My first time using SDL2 too)
• Documentation (Even in the places it is documented, my english is not that good)
• If you find bugs and have new ideas just create issues for them
• Implement tasks from issues