strigui

A small straightforward GUI library that can be extended with new Widgets. At the moment, it only contains widgets for a button, input and a label plus the window component itself. The goal is to provide an easy to use tool to create a simple UI in Clojure. It should provide a few simple widgets to start with, but you can create your own widgets too. It uses Clojure2d underneath. So anything that can be drawn could potentially be a widget (like the game board in Dame).

Note: This is in an alpha stage. I use it mainly to learn Clojure and to write simple desktop apps. Any suggestion or help on coding is absolutely welcome!

See Changes

In project.clj:

:dependencies [[strigui "0.0.1-alpha14"]]

Example

You need the core namespace.

(ns example.core
  (:require [strigui.core :as gui]))

Create the main window via

(gui/window! 600 600)

Basic widgets like buttons, input boxes and labels can be created via

(gui/label! "welcome" "Welcome to Strigui" {:x 190 :y 100
                                             :color [:green]
                                             :font-size 20 :font-style [:bold]})
(gui/button! "click" "Click me" {:x 400 :y 200 :color [:white :black]})
(gui/input! "input" "" {:x 100 :y 150 :color [:white :red] :min-width 420})

The parameters are the name of the widget, the value and a map for the position and optional settings like color, selected?, focused?, can-tab?, can-move? etc. ... The name is used when widgets are modified.

Events can be attached by using the chosen widget name.

(gui/update! "click" :events {:mouse-clicked (fn [wdg]
                                                (gui/info "Button A pressed"))})

A widget can be removed, updated with

(gui/update! "welcome" :value "A new title")
(gui/remove! "input")

It is also possible to retrieve a widget by name via

(gui/find-by-name "click")

Custom widgets can be defined by creating a record that implements the protocol of strigui.widget.Widget

(defprotocol Widget 
    "collection of functions around redrawing widgets, managing the border etc. ..."
  (coord [this canvas] "gets the coordinates of the widget")
  (defaults [this] "attach default values")
  (draw [this canvas] "draw the widget, returns the widget on success"))

See example for reference

A custom widget could be invoked via

...
(:require ...
            [strigui-sample.widget-stacks :as st])
...
(gui/create! (st/->Stack "stacks" '(5 1 8 2 0 3 0 5 7) {:x 100 :y 400}))

As mentioned in the begining, Dame is another example.

The game board and the 2 buttons are strigui widgets.

Edn file

Widgets can now be loaded from a edn file too.

Example: gui-test.edn

{:window [600 600 "From a edn file"]
 :strigui.label/Label [["welcome" "Welcome to Strigui" {:x 190 :y 100
                                                      :color [:green]
                                                      :font-size 20 :font-style [:bold]
                                                      :can-move? true}]]
 :strigui.button/Button [["click" "Click me" {:x 400 :y 250 :z 10 :color [:white :black] :can-tab? true}]]
 :strigui.input/Input [["input" "" {:x 100 :y 150 :color [:white :red] :min-width 420 :selected? true :can-tab? true}]
                       ["input1" "" {:x 100 :y 200 :color [:white :red] :min-width 420 :can-tab? true}]]}

And load it in your clj file via

(ns example.core
  (:require [strigui.core :as gui]))

....
(gui/from-file "gui-test.edn")
...

If a widget name already exists, the widget gets unregistered and replaced by the new widget.

Releasing standalone apps:

When releasing an app which uses strigui, delete the /org/bytedeco directory inside your jar file. This will make your jar about 960 mb smaller. I believe that is being used in clojure2d when working with images. There must be an alternative way skipping this dependency by default.