less_retarded_wiki/gui.md

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# Graphical User Interface
Graphical user interface (GUI) is a visual [user interface](ui.md) that uses graphics such as images and geometrical shapes. This stands in contrast with [text user interface](tui.md) (TUI) which is also visual but only uses text for communication.
2023-02-26 21:42:34 +01:00
Expert computer users normally frown upon GUI because it is the "noobish", inefficient, limiting, cumbersome, hard to automate way of interacting with computer. GUI brings [complexity](complexity.md) and [bloat](bloat.md), they are slow, inefficient and distracting. We try not to use them and prefer the [command line](cli.md).
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"[Modern](modern.md)" GUIs mostly use [callback](callback.md)-based programming, which again is more complicated than standard polling non-interactive I/O. If you need to do GUI, just use a normal infinite loop FFS.
## When And How To Do GUI
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GUI is not forbidden, it has its place, but today it's way too overused -- it should be used only if completely necessary (e.g. in a painting program) or as a completely optional thing built upon a more [suckless](suckless.md) text interface or [API](api.md). So remember: first create a program and/or a [library](library.md) working without GUI and only then consider creating an optional GUI [frontend](frontend.md). GUI must never be tied to whatever functionality can be implemented without it.
Still, when making a GUI, you can make it [suckless](suckless.md) and lighthweight. Do your buttons need to have reflections, soft shadows and rounded anti-aliased borders? No. Do your windows need to be transparent with light-refraction simulation? No. Do you need to introduce many MB of dependencies and pain such as [QT](qt.md)? No.
The ergonomics and aesthetic design of GUIs has its own field and can't be covered here, but just keep in mind some basic things:
- Don't have too many elements (buttons etc.) at the screen at once, it's confusing as hell and drives noobs away.
- Things must be intuitive, i.e. behave in a way that they normally do (e.g. main menu should be at the top of the window, not the bottom etc.).
- Just use your brain. If a button is important and often used, it should probably be bigger than a button that's used almost never, etc.
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The million dollar question is: **which GUI framework to use?** Ideally none. GUI is just pixels, buttons are just rectangles; make your GUI simple enough so that you don't need any shitty abstraction such as widget hierarchies etc. If you absolutely need some framework, look for a suckless one; e.g. [nuklear](nuklear.md) is worth checking out. The suckless community sometimes uses pure [X11](x11.md), however that's not ideal, X11 itself is kind of bloated and it's also getting obsoleted by [Wayland](wayland.md). The ideal solution is to make your GUI **backend agnostic**, i.e. create your own very thin abstraction layer above the backend (e.g. X11) so that any other backend can be plugged in if needed just by rewriting a few simple functions of your abstraction layer (see how e.g. [Anarch](anarch.md) does rendering).
## State Of Mainstream GUI
Nowadays there are a great many GUI [libraries](library.md), [frameworks](framework.md), standards and [paradigms](paradigm.md), and it may be a bit hard to digest them at once.
TODO: some general shit bout graphical windows vs the "single window" mobile and web UI, analysis of the "GUI stack" (Linux framebuffer, X window, widget toolkits etc.), basic widgets etc.