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Comment by Torkel | Hacker News Reader

Nice :) Will you use it for user-facing gui:s, looking forward?

As much as I love Dear ImGUI it's arguably not a good UI for user-facing apps (vs dev team apps)

Supporting all of unicode, all IMEs, emoji, right-to-left languages, etc. is arguably out of scope for Dear ImGUI.

Well, maybe. We use it user-facing for suite of niche vr/tele-op applications and it works wonderfully. We have support for Korean, Japanese, Hebrew (serious issues with right-to-left in our implementation though).

The thing about ImGui is it puts devs on steroids - adding gui is just sooo fast. And fun. And easy to tweak. And easy to debug. 10X, maybe?

I get that for a game maybe the user facing gui is less of an issue - it needs to be really polished and maybe there isn't as "much" gui anyway? But for indie-games and productivity apps, it seems like having a gui option that offers 10X faster development - wouldn't that be really convincing? Even if it isn't 10X, maybe only 1.3X, it still seems like it would be easy to motivate some missing functionality. And I would argue it is way more than 1.3.

And looking forward - IME, emoji, right-to-left: those are just PR:s waiting to be written :)

I'm incredibly bullish on ImGui paradigm. If programmers gravitate towards it and prefer it as much as they do then there is some real power there.

The only bad thing about ImGui is that the Rust port of it... well... sucks. At least the way it handles strings at the moment. Then again I always found Rust's handling of strings to be one of the negatives of that language.

i am so curious about your use of colon to pluralize initialisms (which i've always found awkward to pluralize, especially in lower case). is that cultural? an intentional choice?

Profile mentions .se. Swedish keyboard layout, meant to press apostrophe, still had shift held from writing R, then by accident pressed key to right of apostrophe to obtain colon?

On further thought this works similarly for US layout.

Well - it just looks right to me... As a non-native English speaker I’m probably wrong about it, but compare these:

- guis

- gui’s

- gui:s

Top looks like French. Middle looks like like the gui is owning something. Third is clearly the right choice :)

- GUIs

Yes, ok, maybe that is correct, but why are you screaming?

You have support for Korean and Japanese and Hebrew. How about the rest of unicode? My guess is you have a static or fixed size texture atlas. To put all 140k glyphs of unicode in a single texture atlas would require a 12k by 12k texture assuming 32x32 pixel glyphs. Plenty of devices don't support textures of that size and you'd be limited to just that size of font. Handling this in an actually "all of unicode" way so a user can read documents and type names in all the languages etc ("use facing apps") is not something Dear ImGUI as currently designed can handle AFAIK. It's not just a PR waiting to be written, it would be a large change.

There are other issues with ImGUI paradigm as well. How does it handle accessibility for example. With OS level widgets the OS itself can read the content and deal with accessibility. Same with HTML. But with entirely internal data and just a list of GPU commands that's a huge open issue.

I'm a HUGE fan of Dear ImGUI and have donated $$$$ to it. I think it's awesome. I think there is lots of room and inspiration to be had from Dear ImGUI for making it easier to make UIs. I've written articles on it (https://games.greggman.com/game/imgui-future/) But I'm not blind to its current limits

Very unlikely, I don't really see why we would. All of our engines have their own extensive UI tools that can be used to create rudimentary interface very quickly if needed. Maybe if we ever released like a level editor or something, but I'm not aware of any such thing right now.

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