> I agree that fidget looks like a good starting point. But: The core rendering engine is the most advanced I think for a native Nim UI, and I added a number of small improvements in Fidgetty too. Though it's font handling doesn't use the re-written more powerful font handling that pixie now offers, which is a bummer. That and handling text input are really big impediments.
I believe the immediate mode api just doesn't scale too well. It's easy to hit performance issues and as @treeform mentioned it gets really weird handling complex state. The developer has to know to call `refresh` 2-3 times to get the state to update properly, etc. It's pretty nice for smaller apps but even then it's hard to make handling state and callbacks consistent. However, `pixie` would form a great primitive for a native Nim UI rather than skia or cairo. It's not 100% feature comparable but would by and far be the best option for drawing the actual primitives. Essentially most big UIs something like skia or cairo to rasterize / render things like corners and shadows and then modern frameworks use the GPU to actually do the drawing from those "textures". > The implementation of fidgetty is based on a cloned "development" version of > fidget. Why? Is there any plan under way to reconcile the two? I eventually just used a clone of Fidget in Fidgetty for packaging reasons. The core design is largely the same, but I added a number of tweaks and improvements. I'd say that code would be best to learn from and pick out things like the 9-patch rectangles, etc, but not to build directly from it. > The core widget code (widgets.nim) is completely opaque to me. This may be > because I am a newbie as far as macros are concerned, but to me macros are > properly used to extend language features (i.e. DSLs) and should be readable > in their own terms. Generally macros are never easy to read without a fair bit of work. ;) There's a bit of competition between readable macros and making a DSL robust, etc. That said I have found better ways to make such DSL's with less macros. But Fidgetty had to hack the immediate mode UI in FIdget to support stateful things. Overall I'd recommend a more OO approach for widgets.
