widgem

widgem is a work in progress. It's not ready for use.

widgem is a lightweight cross-platform desktop widget toolkit. It aims to provide standard UI elements for desktop applications (buttons, text inputs, menus, etc.) with consistent look and feel across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Main goals

• Fully featured, predictable behavior: we aim to support all features that are expected from widgets in a native desktop application. This includes:
  • Supporting keyboard-only widget interaction (proper focus handling, navigation, and usage of all widgets).
  • Supporting all standard keyboard shortcuts.
• Accessibility: out-of-the-box integration with screen readers and similar tooling, supporting high-contract themes.
• Theme customization: use a subset of CSS to create a new widget theme for all widgets or customize look of individual widgets.
• Customizable widgets: built-in widgets provide a wide range of properties to augment their behavior.
• Easy extensibility: combine existing widgets into new reusable widgets or create completely new widgets with custom look and behavior.
• Minimal abstraction: we try to keep the codebase as simple as possible, without trying to support all possible use cases.

Explicit non-goals

• Web applications.
• Animations.
• GPU-accelerated rendering.
• Declarative UI.

Running snapshot tests

You can run snapshot tests in Docker to ensure a controlled environment:

./tests/scripts/run_tests_in_docker.sh

It's also possible to run the tests directly on the host system (Linux, Windows, and MacOS are supported):

cargo run --locked --bin widgem_tests -- test

However, in this case, additional requirements must be met:

• The display's resolution must be large enough to fit the test windows (1600x1200 or 1920x1080 will be enough).
• On MacOS:
  • The display scale must be 1 (i.e. it must not use a HiDPI resolution).
  • The display's color profile must be set to sRGB.
  • The test process must be granted the necessary permissions.