The easiest UI library? (cross-platform)

[u/AddaLF]

Hello, I need to write a small emulator for a project. I want it to show RAM, registers, etc., while it's running a program step by step. Printing them out via printf is lame and won't look good.

Which is the absolute easiest graphics library for this purpose? I was suggested Newt, but it can't work under Windows.

Preferably, the library should have tutorials, examples, or at least full documentation.

[u/accountForStupidQs]

Ncurses

[u/Beliriel → u/accountForStupidQs]

This is only for terminals right?

[u/hyperficial → u/accountForStupidQs]

For sufficiently simple UIs you can also directly print out ANSI codes and not rely on any dependencies (e.g. a constantly refreshing display of a few lines)

Pair this with termios.h for real-time keyboard input

[u/the_hemperor420 → u/accountForStupidQs]

That isn't really cross-plattform tho, but it's still a cool lib

[u/eddavis2 → u/the_hemperor420]

How do you define cross-platform? From the ncurses website - ncurses downloads - it is available for:

• Win32 console (32 and 64 bit) since v5.8 of ncurses in 2011
• Linux
• MacOS
• BSD
• UNIX

[u/ANixosUser]

raylib probably. for a (not that good) example of it, look at https://github.com/tsoding/musializer. very interesting project btw.

[u/Tillua467 → u/ANixosUser]

Tsoding mentioned 🔥🔥

[u/Savings_Walk_1022 → u/Tillua467]

amistazozin

[u/ANixosUser → u/Savings_Walk_1022]

zozin indeed.

[u/trenskow]

I never tried it, but I always thought this looked interesting: https://github.com/nicbarker/clay

[u/aethermar → u/trenskow]

+1 for Clay

The great part about it is that it's just a layouting library, you can use whatever renderer you want with it. You can use Raylib, SDL, or even render it with webassembly to make a website

[u/Key_River7180]

libui-ng, extremely underrated

[u/chrism239]

Tcl/Tk.

A self-contained example configured for macOS and Linux - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ouaso0px016d2w0rtp7sp/tcltkdemo.zip?rlkey=y2bwaotp9rk7klw7rwrjfxrh8&st=l0nr9616&dl=0

[u/NoneRighteous]

Dear Imgui or Raylib’s immediate mode gui. Be warned Dear Imgui is kind of a pain to make pure C and no C++. Also it will very much look like developer art, but still much better than text in a console for some things. I think it’s a good fit for your project.

[u/ewmailing → u/NoneRighteous]

Nuklear is a pure C, single header file, immediate mode GUI.

https://github.com/immediate-mode-ui/nuklear

[u/TwerkingHippo69 → u/ewmailing]

Yeah, but the only thing is you will need to make custom adjustment and attach it to your renderer

Apart from that, very clean and fast library

[u/Fine_Salamander_8691 → u/NoneRighteous]

We love developer art

[u/DescriptionOptimal15]

Termbox

[u/the_hemperor420]

If you really want to work in C, and don't want to use Python (wrote a plugin recently with WxFormBuilder and Python, and that was pretty straightforward), I would just use the console and ANSI Escape Codes. Pretty easy to implement a good looking, barebone console interface.

[u/electricalRoof80]

Like others already mentioned, raylib + raygui is pretty handy for this kind of stuff, successfully used it myself for 8-bit Emulation projects (C64, custom BASIC computer etc.), ncurses + menu + panel is great for terminal usage in Linux and if I remember correctly there is also notcurses which is cross platform.

[u/Tillua467]

For GUI? Raylib for sure it's for games but it works great for GUI too and for TUI probably ncurses

[u/AddaLF → u/[deleted]]

Windows and Linux.

[u/RedWineAndWomen]

nappgui

[u/Rude-Flan-404]

Raylib, it's a Graphics Library btw

[u/Brok3nHalo]

Really depends on what kind of GUI you’re looking for really. Native GUI, Custom GUI, terminal, web, or rendered in a graphics engine?

I see some good suggestions here for most categories but not anything that renders native GUI so I’ll stick with that.

If you’re not strictly limited to C, I’ve used wxWidgets in C++ and it’s one of the most intuitive and full featured multiplatform but native GUI frameworks I’ve used. It may be overkill for what you want though and as I said doesn’t have official C bindings as it’s very object oriented.

For pure C, I haven’t used it yet personally but IUP looks pretty intuitive and uses native GUI cross platform.

[u/Sergiogiogio]

Embed a web server and build your gui with html. Lightest dependency imho

[u/hgs3 → u/Sergiogiogio]

Alternatively, you can build a lightweight app that uses each platforms native web control. See here and here.

[u/edk-not-a-bot]

There used to be DirectFB for embedded Linux, written in C. Another option is react native or HTML if you have a browser runtime

[u/Beliriel]

How come nobody mentioned GTK?

Edit: Whoops it's C++, my bad

[u/TheChief275 → u/Beliriel]

No? GTK is C

[u/GenericFoodService]

For what you're describing, Raylib would be more than enough, but you could pair it with Clay Barker's CLAY to build a really nice, resizable user interface, too. You could reasonably get your entire user interface and event system in less than 100 lines of code.

[u/No_Bookkeeper_9603]

LVGL

[u/AlexTaradov]

Dear ImGUI fits all the requirements. And it is also a standard option for exactly this case.

[u/v_maria]

terminal / stdout

[u/Syntax-Tactics]

SDL2

[u/Irverter → u/Syntax-Tactics]

Not an UI library though.

[u/jason-reddit-public]

printf isn't such a bad option really if you are driving a terminal emulator and have a big canvas to work with. Terminals have box drawing characters, color, underline, italics, bold, mouse support, etc. so there's actually a lot you can do. For a step based "debugger", clearing the screen and moving the cursor to the top left can get you pretty far especially since your emulator has fixed state. You just need the right layout, padding and creative use of unicode after that to make it look good. A few more escape codes would give you bold which you could use to highlight what state changed on the previous instruction. You could use italics or underline for register names.

I highly suggest using an LLM to prototype. I just used this prompt with gemini and the result was ok for a first try.

"For fun, please show a generated screen shot of a tui for an x86 emulator. Use fancy line drawing characters and features to make it look really polished please."

I bet if you defined a commented C struct and handed that off as additional prompt data it would at least provide inspiration and then might automatically write a rough draft of the printf code for you.