#egui #gamedev #web-native #web-apps #web-gui

luminol-eframe

egui framework - write GUI apps that compiles to web and/or natively

1 unstable release

0.4.0 Oct 20, 2024

#738 in Game dev


Used in luminol

GPL-3.0 license

2MB
35K SLoC

[!IMPORTANT] luminol-eframe is currently based on emilk/egui@0.28.1

[!NOTE] This is Luminol's modified version of eframe. The original version is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0.

To merge changes from upstream into this crate, first add egui as a remote:

git remote add -f --no-tags egui https://github.com/emilk/egui

Now, decide on which upstream egui commit you want to merge from and figure out the egui commit that the previous upstream merge was based on. The basis of the previous upstream merge should be written at the top of this README. Please update the top of this README after merging.

In this example, we are merging from commit bd087ffb8d7467e0b5aa06d17dd600d511d6a5e8 (egui 0.24.0) and the previous merge was based on commit 5a0186fa2b2324ab437099e456e55e281234ca99 (egui 0.23.0).

git diff \
    5a0186fa2b2324ab437099e456e55e281234ca99:crates/eframe \
    bd087ffb8d7467e0b5aa06d17dd600d511d6a5e8:crates/eframe |
    git apply -3 --directory=crates/eframe

Fix any merge conflicts, and then do git commit.

eframe: the egui framework

Latest version Documentation MIT Apache

eframe is the official framework library for writing apps using egui. The app can be compiled both to run natively (for Linux, Mac, Windows, and Android) or as a web app (using Wasm).

To get started, see the examples. To learn how to set up eframe for web and native, go to https://github.com/emilk/eframe_template/ and follow the instructions there!

There is also a tutorial video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtUkr_z7l84.

For how to use egui, see the egui docs.


eframe uses egui_glow for rendering, and on native it uses egui-winit.

To use on Linux, first run:

sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev libssl-dev

You need to either use edition = "2021", or set resolver = "2" in the [workspace] section of your to-level Cargo.toml. See this link for more info.

You can opt-in to the using egui_wgpu for rendering by enabling the wgpu feature and setting NativeOptions::renderer to Renderer::Wgpu.

To get copy-paste working on web, you need to compile with export RUSTFLAGS=--cfg=web_sys_unstable_apis.

Alternatives

eframe is not the only way to write an app using egui! You can also try egui-miniquad, bevy_egui, egui_sdl2_gl, and others.

You can also use egui_glow and winit to build your own app as demonstrated in https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/master/crates/egui_glow/examples/pure_glow.rs.

Limitations when running egui on the web

eframe uses WebGL (via glow) and Wasm, and almost nothing else from the web tech stack. This has some benefits, but also produces some challenges and serious downsides.

  • Rendering: Getting pixel-perfect rendering right on the web is very difficult.
  • Search: you cannot search an egui web page like you would a normal web page.
  • Bringing up an on-screen keyboard on mobile: there is no JS function to do this, so eframe fakes it by adding some invisible DOM elements. It doesn't always work.
  • Mobile text editing is not as good as for a normal web app.
  • No integration with browser settings for colors and fonts.
  • Accessibility: There is an experimental screen reader for eframe, but it has to be enabled explicitly. There is no JS function to ask "Does the user want a screen reader?" (and there should probably not be such a function, due to user tracking/integrity concerns). egui supports AccessKit, but as of early 2024, AccessKit lacks a Web backend.

In many ways, eframe is trying to make the browser do something it wasn't designed to do (though there are many things browser vendors could do to improve how well libraries like egui work).

The suggested use for eframe are for web apps where performance and responsiveness are more important than accessibility and mobile text editing.

Companion crates

Not all rust crates work when compiled to Wasm, but here are some useful crates have been designed to work well both natively and as Wasm:

Name

The frame in eframe stands both for the frame in which your egui app resides and also for "framework" (eframe is a framework, egui is a library).

Dependencies

~8–55MB
~875K SLoC