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Comment by hilti | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your points about ImGui's intended use case, though I think the landscape is a bit more nuanced. You're right that ImGui excels for dev tools and that its non-standard UX isn't ideal for end-user apps. That said, devs reach for ImGui in end-user apps because lightweight cross-platform alternatives are scarce. Qt is heavy, Electron is heavier, native toolkits mean multiple codebases. I built a techy tool with ImGui (JSONL Viewer Pro) and it works well enough for users who care more about functionality than polish. Not saying it's right for consumer apps, but for technical tools it can be pragmatic.

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> but for technical tools it can be pragmatic

I've thoroughly enjoyed using ImGui for tooling around image processing, computational geometry, a bunch of 3D projection stuff. The fact that it's based on OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever backend you want is a big win for this kind of work. I can just take a bunch of pixels, throw them into a texture, and render some quads with those textures painted on them after going through some 2D transformations or 3D projection/transformation. It's quite beautiful for all of this. ImPlot for doing basic data plotting and the built-in ImGui widgets for controlling the whole thing.

Exactly, I was working on a little client for a self-hosted server app. Imgui is a rare mix of fast, lightweight, trivially cross-platform and stable, so I went with it and had the client easily compiling for Windows, Linux and browser, while being trivial to work with.

I have otherwise mostly given up on making GUI applications because I simply don't have time to pick up a bunch of UI toolkits for all the different platforms, pulling a massive dependency into my project and requiring constant maintenance to keep the program working.

It also have bindings for a ton of languages, so for people who jump languages a lot, it's always nice to be able to reach for something more familiar that you can learn across different codebases but same concepts. Same thing for the backend/engine, UI code remains the same, but easy to switch to others or even wrapping it yourself for platforms that are under NDA.

I know that at least one modding framework for a certain online game makes use of ImGui (or some equivalent thereof). Given the use case it does make a lot of sense, considering they're essentially strapping a third party UI onto an existing 3D accelerated application, not sure what else you'd use for that. Since the users are technical enough to install the mod framework anyways, they tend to be the sort that can handle the UI.

It can be a bit wonky though, I regularly spot UI/UX decisions that seem to map more closely to what the developer is doing under the hood, or their own mental model of the problem, than what one might consider to be an intuitive way of interacting with the system.

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