Super curious about the limitations you see in GPUI! I built a custom rust UI framework for the software i am developing but i always kept an eye on GPUI, what is limiting about it in your opinion?
GPUI and Makepad are the two Rust UI frameworks that seem the most interesting for what I'm looking for in a UI framework (hybrid immediate/retained mode, self-drawn widgets, open source).
Not so much limitations. Rather behaviors I'm used to, around scrolling content, input fields, splitters for resizing panes etc. Can't recall specifics right now. Just small things that I usually get out of the box had to be implemented here.
Ive been thinking this would be amazing to do for ages. happy someone finally did it. its the perfect system for interfaces where speed matters. hope to see more 3d modellers, video editors, daws and simulation systems built on this.
Inkscape is actually one of the few FOSS apps that is actually pretty intuitive to use. In fact, way back when I first started using vector design tools, I found it more intuitive/had better feedback than Illustrator (same thing can't be said about GIMP vs Photoshop). Inkscape really is great, but I have one huge gripe: I'm sure there's a system to it, but the file export name never stays what I want it to be...
People are confusing UX with UI. Inkscape UX might be better for many people but it would be hard to argue that Inkscape UI is better - it got better recently but it's still far from blender polish.
I'm surprised how much everyone's opinions differ in this thread. I've always found blender's UI incredible but inkscape's awful (though nowhere near as bad as gimp)
One of the biggest problems with GIMP and Inkscape is how GTK renders numeric inputs. Look at the size of those +/- icons on the toolbar. For drawing software with lots of numeric inputs, that means an insane waste of space. Proprietary software like DaVinci and even Photopea have much smaller inputs, allowing them to create far more complex GUIs and featuring without cluttering the window.
A lot of these UIs were built around icons, following the direction MS Office took in the early 2000s. These once had colours and were somewhat distinguishable.
When they tried to jump on newer trends they made them all monochrome, and they don't have distinctive sillouettes so it's just completely inscrutable. That Inkscape screenshot is horrible. I count 129 icons.
And yet they still devote so much space to their bizarre colour palette, which is huge but still manages to omit most of the gamut? It's the kind of design that really only comes from decades of OSS development.
I just want to be able to crop and draw on top of images. Like old Paint. That is literally all I want to ever do with images. What should I use in Linux for this purpose
Photocraft has been working alright for me. I really struggled to learn GIMP, and I haven't found any easy lightweight image editing tool that replaces Paint.NET for me before trying Photocraft. It's still a little confusing since I'm not used to photoshop-like bindings and layout, but it hasn't been too hard to adjust. (I also only ever use it for small simple edits, drawing, cropping, color gradients, background removal, etc.)
I easily modified pinta to do exactly this. You mean overlay, right? It can overlay, draw, manipulate, and I added a better file navigator so I can see which imagery I want to overlay to begin with. My use case was scientific in nature. What is yours, if you don’t mind my asking?
If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.
If you're already using Blender to make assets, there's some benefit to stuffing Blender's UI into your game editor too.
> Baby duck syndrome is a cognitive bias where people automatically prefer the first system, interface, or product they learn to use, judging all later versions or alternatives by how well they match that initial experience.
That's actually extremely common in scientific (GUI) software. And in any professional setting I guess.
> That's actually extremely common in scientific (GUI) software. And in any professional setting I guess.
I don't think that qualifies. There's an important distinction to be made between an aesthetic preference versus a professional not appreciating a tool being mucked with. Anything that interferes with my workflow without immediately providing substantial benefit is something that's actively harmful. In fact even if it does hypothetically provide huge benefits I still might not want to deal with it right this second.
So if it's for an employer it's rational but if you're making the same choice for yourself it isn't? If one of those is baby duck syndrome they all are.
I think they're noting how the nature of baby duck syndrome might depend on whether the change introduced is within something that is for work or for play.
As in, that people who refuse change in their play activity are in some way different (less rational? more "syndromatic"?) than those who refuse change in their breadwinning activity.
I see the distinction, but am not sure I agree. It's just a neurotype spectrum of the same phenomenon. Baby duck is baby duck
Blender had a very different ui before and a big redesign, so most people have different opinions between the old and the new design. It sounds like you find all of them awful. I find that surprising and wonder what 3d program you find have good ui.
I have used every version of blender and it has always felt harder than it should.
I have used 3Ds max, maya, lightwave, cinema4D, milkshape, wings, Houdini, unreal engine 1 - 5, Hammer, Threejs editor and probably more. The Blender UI is worse than all of the above.
The question was which one do you think has a good UI... I'd be keen to know your opinion on this as well, what you think the current high water mark is in 3D design software UI is, or do you think they all suck, but Blender just sucks the most?
At the time of blender's old ui 3Ds max had menus nested 5-6 level deep in an ui that would make gimp very good design. Between that 3Ds max praise, conflating old blender ui and new blender ui, and not providing any specifics on what makes blender so bad (I just provided some about 3D max) I have to assume there is no truth to it. We will agree to disagree. I think blender ui is excellent, but a 3d editor is a specialised app.
With 3Ds Max listed as good UI we really must just have different tastes, hah! :D
You've given quite a list of tools with different purpose.
For 3D work I would personally rate
Modo 3D, Zbrush > Blender, Houdini > Softimage XSI > Maya > space intentionally left empty :P > 3Ds max
Blender UI looks very nice and is very customizable. I think it's "ok" in beginner discoverability (none of 3D softs is great at that really) but when you get experienced with it it's one of the best.
I really like how they managed to keep all the tools and views pretty consistent given how many things you can do in it. Whether you are working on objects, vertices, nodes, movie clips you get the same shortcuts where possible.
I'm not a professional designer or 3D modeler but I've used Blender quite a bit. I know what you mean but the latest UI post redesign isn't bad.
Blender does a LOT of stuff. Its not an easy product to create an UI for. But I think the problem is much bigger when coming from a different 3D package than when learning from scratch.
My teenage kids use Blender as the first 3D package they've ever learned. I was impressed with how quickly they ramped up through videos and learning from each other.
> I think a lot of the new blender generation has baby duck syndrome.
Maybe some of them do, but even though I disliked the UI at first, I've come to appreciate it as I've learned it. It's simply different from most other software, so that obviously causes friction. However, I think once you learn it, it's quite a good system. There's a tradeoff between optimizing for familiarity/new users, and providing an optimized experience for advanced users.
>If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.
Not in an age of AI.
I mean if you want to code all this stuff by hand, I get it. But that's a choice. And since it's a choice that means shoehorning a Blender UI into a "bargain-basement game editor" (and having a "bargain basement game editor) isnt really needed. You absolutely don't need to spend a lot of time arranging UI stuff.
Game tooling is pretty trivial now and it's not user-facing. Again, I fully understand why someone would want to do this themselves still but let's not pretend thats not a choice at this point.
Why not? For similar applications it would be really beneficial to not have to reimplement all the little UI interactions they've polished over the years
This is just repeating a common meme. Blender's UI layout and organisation is fine, but this is a UI library. There's nothing wrong with blender's UI technically, in fact its pretty decent overall
I absolutely detest it (TBF I haven't used it for the past ~2 years) but I also recognize that it's an incredibly difficult problem space that lacks an obviously good solution, the tool itself is inherently and irreducibly complex, it's a free project with extremely limited resources, it's been consistently improving over time, etc, etc.
Everybody hates all serious 3d application interfaces… they’re just complicated. I’m professionally competent in Houdini, Maya, Max, Blender, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, the UE editor… they all suck in various ways but it’s all a giant set of trade-offs and priorities. Beyond that, lots of these programs have lineages that go back decades longer than almost any modern dev environment and being so complex, UI changes can be quite disruptive. Kind of like why so many *nix cli tools are the same as they were decades ago. A lot of (no, not all) developers think they have the most complex tooling in the computer world — they definitely don’t.
There's a lot of thought in Blender's UI, and a lot of improvements over the years.
Fundamentally all 3d modelers have inherent degree of complexity. The ones that give a "simple" facade with fewer options make other things harder or having to look into obscure places.
All of that are beside the point however: people will use this as a GUI library, not as a Blender's UX design.
Despite rumours to the contrary not everything is best interacted with via an LLM. If you want to go to that degree then have at it, all you need is an old school TTY on a serial cable, but the rest of us quite like having UIs designed to fulfil a purpose rather than a soup of Claudeish prose describing a progress bar.
No? I think there would easily be other use cases where Blenders UI would be very suitable, e.g. Audio software.
It is not a UI paradigm that you would use for just anything, but for certain poweruser software it is one of the best paradigms I have seen, especially since they managed to get rid of 90% of the rough corners in the past decade of development.
Definitely a worthy goal but they've gone down a super weird route by providing clones of other GUI toolkit APIs on top of this. Your target audience is people that are ok with vibe coding. They don't care about switching to a proper Blender-style API.
Most native widget toolkits don't actually support rendering into 3d canvasses very well, nor very compact UI layouts. I generally prefer native widgets, but for a dense prosumer application, they aren't always the correct choice (and you'll see even Apple stray from their native UI widgets for, say, Logic Pro)
But the premise is silly: if Linux has two native toolkits, how is this a sensible recommendation?? Hint: it isn’t, because GTK/Qt are not the native, but rather simply the most used.
Also, go to Mac, and SwiftUI still doesn’t support all that AppKit used to, leaving an incentive for developers to deviate from the platform’s recommendation.
And back to Windows, WinUI still doesn’t fully replace Win32 or Windows Forms, so same conclusion applies.
> But the premise is silly: if Linux has two native toolkits, how is this a sensible recommendation?? Hint: it isn’t, because GTK/Qt are not the native, but rather simply the most used.
I’m going to hazard the claim that in probably most people’s conception of the term, GTK is native in GNOME, Cinnamon, Xfce, etc. and Qt is native in KDE, LXQt and Sailfish OS.
I am pretty sure HN is an enclave of the only remaining people in the world who think this way. A sanctuary preserving the last specimens of an endangered species.
None of the apps on my computer have any sort of cohesion with each other. It might just be me but I think this idea is dead, on Windows and Linux at least.
GPL is the best opensource license. But seeing this as a library, it might need to be LGPL rather than pure GPL (ala, you can use it as a library without "tainting" your source, but if you make modifications to the library, you must release it).
May be, but AGPL is intended for server based apps, rather than local apps (which i presume this library is intended, but i suppose the javascript part can be considered to fall into the server category).
and thats fine. without LLMs no human would have invested so much required time and effort to do this! and now such awesome things are possible with a bit of tokens and a small prompt. overall a win
It would be nice if the original chat history with claude is included in the repo. That way design choices are clear and its easier to review and improve upon.
Well.. Old discussion but I actually think it's the better way (sorry. MIT, you are more free then anything).
Either contribute back or stay away from open source work that others did for you.
My understanding is that the LLM stripped away the non-UI code from Blender. The majority of the code is ported directly from GPL'd code from the Blender code base.
Most software is not GPL. When comparing this to alternatives like EGUI and GPUI for building a new app, this cannot be considered, while the others can.
GPL makes sense for applications like Blender. For a general purpose library, it's a dealbreaker.
I was just a kid in 2002, so couldn’t contribute, but I remember checking the MoneyMeter going up every day, so that the community could buy out Blender and make it free software. GPL does restrict it, but it’s also only the only reason Blender is not a long forgotten piece of software from the 90s.
What makes you say that? It was the part that goes...
> The repository is built entirely using LLMs, with no human-written code. The drawing and interaction code is ported from Blender's sources, and the behavior is checked by tests: C, Python, Rust and JavaScript suites, the tkinter side-by-side programs and the GPU parity test.
This is excellent. I thought about this years ago for an OpenGL based desktop UI. Apple's UI is using something similar I believe. And the Windows UI too is mostly rendered using Direct3D (which is comparable to OpenGL) since Vista.
I hope someone else uses this for a new Linux distro.
Well, given that so many folks always argue they are Linux distros even though it is an implementation detail for userspace APIs, ChromeOS, WebOS and Android.
I have a python "DSL" which allows to create a simple UI for synth parameters you also make in python. It uses Tk and looks like, mmm, Tk with all other Tk issues. Project was abandoned because of it. Looks like it's time to revive!
After further exploration, it does work, but not without fiddling around with the tkinter code that exists. Not bad results; better than the original Tkinter rendering, anyway, unless you like that retro look.
For anyone looking at Rust GUI: don't expect GPUI to be the fastest. From what I've heard, Iced, Slint, Dioxus Native, Freya, etc are all faster. Despite claims of being blazingly fast, GPUI isn't that optimized. Zed gets away with it because it's UI is simple.
If only the game I am surely going to develop some day would not waste 7% of the rendering budget on drawing the menu sliders! Must research all options now before I start. Must make an objective choice, so I need number that can be compared neutrally between frameworks. So, rendering performance it is.
Why the snarky comment? We already have to data points: one person heard it was faster, another person heard it was slower. If more and more people tell what they've heard then we will know the truth. Please go read how science works!
These are CPU-only times for the state management / style / layout / etc, but don't include rasterization (additional work in the benchmark harness required to measure GPU time sensibly), probably aren't fully apples-to-apples, and could probably do with testing some more complex layouts.
This matches my findings. Asides from some performance footgun, it all strikes me as a single purpose, low level thing with a DX only an LLM could love. I suppose many today don't need more than that but I found the other Rust GUI solutions to be maturing rapidly with better stories across the board.
The main thing GPUI has going for it is mind share and that's a great thing to have. The mind share is unfortunately highly fragmented though as the original authors are not interested in selling a GUI library. Hopefully the community efforts will come together to produce a more polished and general library. A well used library is better than a better designed one maintained by a single person.
Nice! I've been waiting for someone to do this for a long time. Now I'll just need to wait a bit longer for someone to apply this to FreeCAD. Boy oh boy!
That's really cool! I burned some tokens trying to develop something similar but gave up halfway. A lot of people criticize Blender's UI but as someone who has been using blender for more than a decade now I just find it so elegant. Just the customizability itself is something I miss on most 3D software, if not all of them. Being able to just split screens and change their functionality, paired with the tabs for different workflows, it is a really good solution for a very complex software. I'd like to see a game engine with this much UI freedom.
Nice. I have my own GPU GUI toolkit I'm satisfied with and developed because I did not want to have yet another imgui looking app that required gpu accelerated UI toolkit.
But, if I did not invest last two years into my own toolkit, I'd definitively consider.
Others have noted that GPLv3 is required (which is a show stopper for many) but I'd like to mention that I find the pill saying "GPLv2 or Later" in the project itself misleading.
Especially since v2 and v3 have vastly different consequences.
Can I please congratulate you on your README. It rapidly tells me what I'm looking at, and why I might be interested in the project. There are so many READMEs around that ... just don't do that. They ramble about technical implementation details, how their language choice is amazing, and a third of the way through the README, I'm still left wondering, "but what does this project do?".
Yes, this is so important and yet so often not considered. This README was pretty good, thorough and not ambiguous. The number of projects that assume you know what their obscure idea relates to is huge, mainly as the authors can't put themselves in the shoes of their audience.
Many of my old >1K star GitHub projects were not that great, but I always made sure to create the cleanest, simplest possible READMEs, inspired by things like the Python requests library's docs (https://github.com/psf/requests). I think it helped a lot in their success.
I remember someone once created a GitHub issue requesting I turn the README into some verbose technical thing with full API docs and a bunch of people replied saying they greatly preferred the "pitch + high-level examples" style.
It still sounds like LLM which is nauseating to read. For instance: "Blender's interface is famous for how it feels. You press a number field and drag: the cursor vanishes, the value glides under your hand, and you never hit the edge of the screen. " that's ChatGPT writing.
It is ALL AI generated I can say that because I recently worked on a landing page and wrestled with Claude Opus the WHOLE way through. Claude has no idea how to write copy. Neither do any of the others, you have to edit with a fine-toothed comb.
To the project maintainer: don’t ask people to read a terrible AI generated sales pitch novella that quantifies your AI generated port against every UI framework out there.
Here’s the obvious giveaways:
“ 4. The many ways in”
“ Python, four ways”
“ tkinter: all 7,846 public names of tkinter and ttk. Nine real programs behave identically on the standard library and on BUI.”
“ Rust: the web platform, natively”
Ugh it’s excruciating. You’re better off with a readme that shows a few screenshots and installation instructions.
I find it to be confusing LLM spam. It spends a lot of time talking about Qt APIs, and dearimgui... most of which could go in a separate page.
But the worst part is all code snippets are followed by an image which is not related to the code snippet. It's not what you get by typing the code... it's something completely different.
I have the same idea 10 years ago. :D I am so happy seeing that somebody was capable of making it. I always admire blenders UI and all the work developers did on making it.
I don’t buy arguments like much faster than X. Take X let claude work on it for 2 days and it will be fast. In case of gpui I took the community version as a part of my project and it is quite fast because it is optimized for my app.
But, can it work without GPU? All native toolkits have fallback to software rendering. I do not uderstand what is gained, cpu was good enough for that since Windows 95 era? Just do not redraw every frame like in games but retain instead?
The project is dishonest. Maybe AI agent was instructed to split Blender UI code, but what happened instead is AI implemented a classic immediate UI, not even reading the code.
I just tried few very standard operations that every Blender user knows:
1) Drag vertically across multiple number inputs to enter multiedit mode - failed (even though main page advertises this: "Drag down across X, Y and Z to edit all three at once")
2) Hover on field, press Ctrl+C, hover on another field - press Ctrl+V - failed
3) Press shift while dragging - it glitched
4) Scale UI - failed
5) Collapse collapsible block - failed
6) Right click - reset to default - failed
7) Jump to next field with Tab (while editing) - failed
8) Automatic alt accelerators - failed
9) Tooltips - N/A
10) AI slop: funny cursors, focus outline
So basically it is more like styled imgui (less polished than Blender), rather than Blender's UI.
I'm not saying that it is impossible to do a honest implementation, but one needs to kick agent much more to prevent cheating, and actually know how Blender UI works.
Probably it works in other implementations (I did not try); in web it produces <input type="text"> and agent likely gave up trying to simulate such details there.
I'm excited, and will try this! Its provenance speaks loads, as Blender is a beacon of software design, open-source or otherwise.
I'm an EGUI fanboy, but am looking to truly compare it to other things, especially non-immediate mode. I have no gripes with EGUI, other than it seems to create an application size floor, and I suspect memory use could be better. It has never blocked me, including for complex applications with GPU rendering etc.
Blender is peak OSS. I'm in! Will give this a shot for my next limited-scope application. I'm also experimenting with GPUUI.
I will try Slint if I ever do embedded with a full GUI.
I will poke at this, because I saw the same sentiment in a HN thread yesterday:
>" You write Rust or React and want a native desktop UI without shipping a browser." You don't need to ship a browser to do GUIs in rust. Some people do, and justify it through comparisons to Electron (Tauri) - I suspect this is a pushback against that?
Another thing I will poke at from comments: If you're going to dismiss this as a non-native UI and therefor inferior: Post specifically what features your OS-native toolkit or OS conventions have that won't work here. (Is it hotkeys, color scheme, a Je-ne-sais quoi? What OS specifically? My pet theory is these are all MacOS users, but I'm not sure)
This looks like a nice quick option for python scripts. I've made a web interface using fastapi for my python script because that seemed the most sane choice at the time but I would've used tkinter but for my lack of familiarity with tk/tcl and it's retro look.
scotty79 | 7 hours ago
Swapping it for UI that's as battle tested as Blender might improve things.
_odi_ | 6 hours ago
zigzag312 | 4 hours ago
GPUI and Makepad are the two Rust UI frameworks that seem the most interesting for what I'm looking for in a UI framework (hybrid immediate/retained mode, self-drawn widgets, open source).
scotty79 | 3 hours ago
chiroyce | 7 hours ago
cultofmetatron | 7 hours ago
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felixthehat | 6 hours ago
https://cleanshot.com/share/WW9yFdMy
AlienRobot | 4 hours ago
rcxdude | an hour ago
rozab | 3 hours ago
When they tried to jump on newer trends they made them all monochrome, and they don't have distinctive sillouettes so it's just completely inscrutable. That Inkscape screenshot is horrible. I count 129 icons.
And yet they still devote so much space to their bizarre colour palette, which is huge but still manages to omit most of the gamut? It's the kind of design that really only comes from decades of OSS development.
anon-3988 | 6 hours ago
phillc73 | 6 hours ago
adhamsalama | 5 hours ago
amlib | 5 hours ago
TonyStr | 4 hours ago
Imustaskforhelp | 4 hours ago
I’d be interested to know what you think about it
[0]: https://github.com/daijro/paint.rs
lozf | 4 hours ago
[0]: https://gradia.alexandervanhee.be/ [1]: https://www.pinta-project.com/ [2]: https://krita.org/en/
wavewrangler | 4 hours ago
bondarchuk | 3 hours ago
graynk | 3 hours ago
whywhywhywhy | 2 hours ago
dev0p | 7 hours ago
And I do appreciate the effort that goes into it, especially in the latest versions as it got much better,
But I really really really REALLY don't want that UI in anything else other than Blender.
Please don't.
OtherShrezzing | 7 hours ago
If you're already using Blender to make assets, there's some benefit to stuffing Blender's UI into your game editor too.
archerx | 6 hours ago
cl3misch | 6 hours ago
> Baby duck syndrome is a cognitive bias where people automatically prefer the first system, interface, or product they learn to use, judging all later versions or alternatives by how well they match that initial experience.
That's actually extremely common in scientific (GUI) software. And in any professional setting I guess.
fc417fc802 | 5 hours ago
I don't think that qualifies. There's an important distinction to be made between an aesthetic preference versus a professional not appreciating a tool being mucked with. Anything that interferes with my workflow without immediately providing substantial benefit is something that's actively harmful. In fact even if it does hypothetically provide huge benefits I still might not want to deal with it right this second.
conartist6 | 3 hours ago
So if it's for an employer it's rational but if you're making the same choice for yourself it isn't? If one of those is baby duck syndrome they all are.
patcon | 2 hours ago
As in, that people who refuse change in their play activity are in some way different (less rational? more "syndromatic"?) than those who refuse change in their breadwinning activity.
I see the distinction, but am not sure I agree. It's just a neurotype spectrum of the same phenomenon. Baby duck is baby duck
mejutoco | 5 hours ago
archerx | 4 hours ago
I have used 3Ds max, maya, lightwave, cinema4D, milkshape, wings, Houdini, unreal engine 1 - 5, Hammer, Threejs editor and probably more. The Blender UI is worse than all of the above.
bacheaul | 4 hours ago
mejutoco | 3 hours ago
miniupuchaty | 2 hours ago
You've given quite a list of tools with different purpose.
For 3D work I would personally rate
Modo 3D, Zbrush > Blender, Houdini > Softimage XSI > Maya > space intentionally left empty :P > 3Ds max
Blender UI looks very nice and is very customizable. I think it's "ok" in beginner discoverability (none of 3D softs is great at that really) but when you get experienced with it it's one of the best.
I really like how they managed to keep all the tools and views pretty consistent given how many things you can do in it. Whether you are working on objects, vertices, nodes, movie clips you get the same shortcuts where possible.
sehugg | 4 hours ago
My baby duck fingers could probably pick up LightWave 3D again in an hour or two. I could never gel with Blender.
glimshe | 3 hours ago
Blender does a LOT of stuff. Its not an easy product to create an UI for. But I think the problem is much bigger when coming from a different 3D package than when learning from scratch.
My teenage kids use Blender as the first 3D package they've ever learned. I was impressed with how quickly they ramped up through videos and learning from each other.
wtetzner | an hour ago
Maybe some of them do, but even though I disliked the UI at first, I've come to appreciate it as I've learned it. It's simply different from most other software, so that obviously causes friction. However, I think once you learn it, it's quite a good system. There's a tradeoff between optimizing for familiarity/new users, and providing an optimized experience for advanced users.
SkiFire13 | 4 hours ago
nonethewiser | 40 minutes ago
Not in an age of AI.
I mean if you want to code all this stuff by hand, I get it. But that's a choice. And since it's a choice that means shoehorning a Blender UI into a "bargain-basement game editor" (and having a "bargain basement game editor) isnt really needed. You absolutely don't need to spend a lot of time arranging UI stuff.
Game tooling is pretty trivial now and it's not user-facing. Again, I fully understand why someone would want to do this themselves still but let's not pretend thats not a choice at this point.
PalmPilotProMax | 7 hours ago
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lentil_soup | 7 hours ago
luckydata | 6 hours ago
20k | 5 hours ago
fc417fc802 | 5 hours ago
I absolutely detest it (TBF I haven't used it for the past ~2 years) but I also recognize that it's an incredibly difficult problem space that lacks an obviously good solution, the tool itself is inherently and irreducibly complex, it's a free project with extremely limited resources, it's been consistently improving over time, etc, etc.
DrewADesign | 4 hours ago
coldtea | 4 hours ago
Fundamentally all 3d modelers have inherent degree of complexity. The ones that give a "simple" facade with fewer options make other things harder or having to look into obscure places.
All of that are beside the point however: people will use this as a GUI library, not as a Blender's UX design.
omnimus | 3 hours ago
Jtarii | 5 minutes ago
It is actually a miracle that it is as good as it is considering other open source graphics programs like GIMP are horrendous to use.
amelius | 6 hours ago
jon-wood | 6 hours ago
atoav | 6 hours ago
Yeah you can do that. If you have low standards and don't need control of the details.
coldtea | 4 hours ago
atoav | 6 hours ago
It is not a UI paradigm that you would use for just anything, but for certain poweruser software it is one of the best paradigms I have seen, especially since they managed to get rid of 90% of the rough corners in the past decade of development.
rramon | 5 hours ago
But a good design system does the trick. Artcraft apps use this library and their Adobe clones come very close to the original apps.
anthk | 2 hours ago
wavewrangler | 4 hours ago
Q: “Whats wrong with tkinter?!?!”
A: It sucks, that’s what!
coldtea | 4 hours ago
That UI is fine to be on many more places than Blender, given that many libraries people use are way worse. Imgui for one example.
IshKebab | 7 hours ago
Just because you can...
MomsAVoxell | 6 hours ago
andsoitis | 7 hours ago
swiftcoder | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
scns | 5 hours ago
swiftcoder | 5 hours ago
A quarter-century ago, yes. If they haven't migrated to native widgets in 25 years, that might be an indicator of something
p-e-w | 6 hours ago
bvrmn | 6 hours ago
chem83 | 5 hours ago
But the premise is silly: if Linux has two native toolkits, how is this a sensible recommendation?? Hint: it isn’t, because GTK/Qt are not the native, but rather simply the most used.
Also, go to Mac, and SwiftUI still doesn’t support all that AppKit used to, leaving an incentive for developers to deviate from the platform’s recommendation.
And back to Windows, WinUI still doesn’t fully replace Win32 or Windows Forms, so same conclusion applies.
spider-mario | 3 hours ago
I’m going to hazard the claim that in probably most people’s conception of the term, GTK is native in GNOME, Cinnamon, Xfce, etc. and Qt is native in KDE, LXQt and Sailfish OS.
anonymous908213 | 6 hours ago
creata | 3 hours ago
antman | 7 hours ago
chii | 5 hours ago
solyin | 5 hours ago
chii | 5 hours ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | 3 hours ago
I don't think we can use LGPL since we were derived from Blender's Source code, which is GPL.
the__alchemist | 10 minutes ago
Groxx | 6 hours ago
>The repository is built entirely using LLMs, with no human-written code. ...
artemonster | 6 hours ago
opem | 4 hours ago
orbital-decay | 3 hours ago
holoduke | 2 hours ago
doublerabbit | 47 minutes ago
xiange | 6 hours ago
buster | 6 hours ago
thisismyanon2 | 5 hours ago
ZoomZoomZoom | 4 hours ago
wtetzner | 50 minutes ago
BowBun | 52 minutes ago
the__alchemist | 8 minutes ago
GPL makes sense for applications like Blender. For a general purpose library, it's a dealbreaker.
exitb | 6 hours ago
kqp | 5 hours ago
CarVac | an hour ago
But that wouldn't work for a straight derivative of a GPL project.
slopinthebag | 4 hours ago
ivanjermakov | 3 hours ago
p-e-w | 6 hours ago
I’ve not once thought “Man, those widgets are slow!”
spoiler | 6 hours ago
Do Maya and others have better UIs? Honestly, I find them more repulsive than Blender's
keyle | 6 hours ago
Zecc | 6 hours ago
> The repository is built entirely using LLMs, with no human-written code. The drawing and interaction code is ported from Blender's sources, and the behavior is checked by tests: C, Python, Rust and JavaScript suites, the tkinter side-by-side programs and the GPU parity test.
...wasn't it?
gostsamo | 6 hours ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | 3 hours ago
spider-mario | 3 hours ago
hn_submit | 6 hours ago
I hope someone else uses this for a new Linux distro.
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
petterroea | 6 hours ago
> The drawing code is a C port of Blender's own widget code
How can we guarantee BUI is still performant?
bvrmn | 6 hours ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | 44 minutes ago
It's time to do it! Also we have a discord, if you end up reviving it, do share it over here:
https://discord.gg/MWXZfdyM3D
pythonRon | 6 hours ago
pythonRon | 5 hours ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | 31 minutes ago
luckydata | 5 hours ago
Washuu | 5 hours ago
I think I will keep going with my own efforts, but this looks nice!
[OP] ppmpreetham | 3 hours ago
We also have a kotlin binding support coming soon, btw!
phillc73 | 5 hours ago
[1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
[2] https://calibre-ebook.com/
lukechu10 | 5 hours ago
nicoburns | 4 hours ago
bita_nidir | 4 hours ago
hackyhacky | 4 hours ago
Matumio | 3 hours ago
dzogchen | 2 hours ago
nicoburns | an hour ago
These are CPU-only times for the state management / style / layout / etc, but don't include rasterization (additional work in the benchmark harness required to measure GPU time sensibly), probably aren't fully apples-to-apples, and could probably do with testing some more complex layouts.
shaky-carrousel | 3 hours ago
rat9988 | 3 hours ago
cropcirclbureau | an hour ago
The main thing GPUI has going for it is mind share and that's a great thing to have. The mind share is unfortunately highly fragmented though as the original authors are not interested in selling a GUI library. Hopefully the community efforts will come together to produce a more polished and general library. A well used library is better than a better designed one maintained by a single person.
rudedogg | 5 minutes ago
It’d be like naming my http library HTTP.
And it’s why Dear IMGUI isn’t just named “IMGUI”.
contingencies | 4 hours ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | 3 hours ago
contingencies | 3 hours ago
parasti | 4 hours ago
creata | 4 hours ago
bita_nidir | 4 hours ago
lukebitts | 3 hours ago
foobarbecue | 3 hours ago
anthk | 3 hours ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | an hour ago
I do hate vibe coding. So I took a different approach for BUI.
Instead of asking the agent to decouple the UI, I asked it to remove all the parts which isn't a part of UI logic.
Turns out AI is pretty good at removing than generating.
papa0101 | an hour ago
panzi | 3 hours ago
hollowonepl | 3 hours ago
But, if I did not invest last two years into my own toolkit, I'd definitively consider.
michaelanckaert | 12 minutes ago
anthk | 3 hours ago
xlii | 2 hours ago
Especially since v2 and v3 have vastly different consequences.
munksbeer | 2 hours ago
rubatuga | 2 hours ago
nmstoker | 2 hours ago
meowface | 2 hours ago
I remember someone once created a GitHub issue requesting I turn the README into some verbose technical thing with full API docs and a bunch of people replied saying they greatly preferred the "pitch + high-level examples" style.
[OP] ppmpreetham | 2 hours ago
munksbeer | 2 hours ago
"Blender's user interface, as a library you can use from Python, Rust, JavaScript (React, Svelte), C, C++ and Dear ImGui."
This tells me a huge amount of what I need to know, if I'm interested in this project or not.
Compare it to another very recent example posted on hn: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet - You need to get some way down the page until it discloses what you might be able to do with the project. https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet#use-cases
But by that stage, even though it isn't very far down the page, I'm already checked out.
[OP] ppmpreetham | an hour ago
We also have a discord server, lmk if you're planning on using BUI!
varispeed | an hour ago
whatthejesus | 42 minutes ago
To the project maintainer: don’t ask people to read a terrible AI generated sales pitch novella that quantifies your AI generated port against every UI framework out there.
Here’s the obvious giveaways:
“ 4. The many ways in” “ Python, four ways”
“ tkinter: all 7,846 public names of tkinter and ttk. Nine real programs behave identically on the standard library and on BUI.”
“ Rust: the web platform, natively”
Ugh it’s excruciating. You’re better off with a readme that shows a few screenshots and installation instructions.
flipthefrog | an hour ago
laserbeam | 50 minutes ago
But the worst part is all code snippets are followed by an image which is not related to the code snippet. It's not what you get by typing the code... it's something completely different.
kitkarl | 2 hours ago
quotemstr | 2 hours ago
et1337 | an hour ago
mariocesar | 2 hours ago
pjankiewicz | 2 hours ago
feelamee | 2 hours ago
samiv | 2 hours ago
Is it retained mode UI?
gen2brain | 2 hours ago
zamadatix | an hour ago
Lockal | an hour ago
I just tried few very standard operations that every Blender user knows:
1) Drag vertically across multiple number inputs to enter multiedit mode - failed (even though main page advertises this: "Drag down across X, Y and Z to edit all three at once")
2) Hover on field, press Ctrl+C, hover on another field - press Ctrl+V - failed
3) Press shift while dragging - it glitched
4) Scale UI - failed
5) Collapse collapsible block - failed
6) Right click - reset to default - failed
7) Jump to next field with Tab (while editing) - failed
8) Automatic alt accelerators - failed
9) Tooltips - N/A
10) AI slop: funny cursors, focus outline
So basically it is more like styled imgui (less polished than Blender), rather than Blender's UI.
I'm not saying that it is impossible to do a honest implementation, but one needs to kick agent much more to prevent cheating, and actually know how Blender UI works.
[OP] ppmpreetham | an hour ago
It works perfectly on my machine, and another friend's machine. Just to be sure, which demo did you try? the website or python or rust?
Lockal | an hour ago
Probably it works in other implementations (I did not try); in web it produces <input type="text"> and agent likely gave up trying to simulate such details there.
[OP] ppmpreetham | an hour ago
Let me update the web samples. Thank you!
the__alchemist | an hour ago
I'm an EGUI fanboy, but am looking to truly compare it to other things, especially non-immediate mode. I have no gripes with EGUI, other than it seems to create an application size floor, and I suspect memory use could be better. It has never blocked me, including for complex applications with GPU rendering etc.
Blender is peak OSS. I'm in! Will give this a shot for my next limited-scope application. I'm also experimenting with GPUUI.
I will try Slint if I ever do embedded with a full GUI.
I will poke at this, because I saw the same sentiment in a HN thread yesterday: >" You write Rust or React and want a native desktop UI without shipping a browser." You don't need to ship a browser to do GUIs in rust. Some people do, and justify it through comparisons to Electron (Tauri) - I suspect this is a pushback against that?
Another thing I will poke at from comments: If you're going to dismiss this as a non-native UI and therefor inferior: Post specifically what features your OS-native toolkit or OS conventions have that won't work here. (Is it hotkeys, color scheme, a Je-ne-sais quoi? What OS specifically? My pet theory is these are all MacOS users, but I'm not sure)
bobajeff | an hour ago
pmkary | an hour ago
xixixao | an hour ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | 4 minutes ago
Aeolun | an hour ago
[OP] ppmpreetham | an hour ago
andsoitis | an hour ago
Direct3D is at version 12 on Windows[1].
What tech on macOS? OpenGL?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D