KAS GUI

KAS is the toolKit Abstraction System. It comprises:

• kas: the core of the GUI library, providing core interfaces and types, standard widgets, widget layout and event handling
• kas_macros: a helper crate providing the procedural macros used by kas
• kas_wgpu: an interface to [winit] and [wgpu], providing windowing and hardware-accelerated rendering

A user depends on kas to write their complete UI specification, and then pastes a few lines of code to initialise kas_wgpu::Toolkit, add the window and run the UI.

Examples

Several examples are available on the kas_wgpu sub-crate. Try e.g.

cd kas-wgpu cargo run --example calculator

Cross-platform

KAS uses cross-platform libraries, allowing it to target all major platforms. Current development & test targets:

• Linux / X11
• Linux / Wayland

It should work fine on other platforms, although this is largely untested. Feedback & fixes welcome.

Features

• Custom parent widgets with embedded state (at in Qt)
• Type-safe event handlers from the context of these widgets
• Custom widgets over high- or low-level event API
• Custom widgets over high-level draw API (TODO: low level option)
• Flexible grid layouts with spans
• Width-for-height calculations
• Custom themes (with full control of sizing and rendering)
• Touch-screen support
• Keyboard navigation & accelerator keys
• Fully scalable (hidpi)
• Mult-window support
• GPU-accelerated
• Very memory and CPU efficient (aside from some pending optimisations)

Data model and specification

KAS is in part motivated by some of the common limitations of UIs:

• specification is often redundant, requiring widgets to be created, added to a parent, sometimes forcing elements to be named when any custom properties are required
• declarative specifications may need to be recreated frequently
• user state (data) and UI models are often separated, making event handling and data transfer more difficult than ought be necessary

KAS takes some inspiration from Qt (but using macros in place of language extensions), in that custom widget structs may combine user state and UI components. Most of KAS is inspired by finding a maximally-type-safe, flexible "Rustic" solution to the problem at hand.

Drawing and themes

One of the key problems to solve in a UI is the question of how are widgets drawn? Already, multiple approaches have been tried and abandoned:

• kas_gtk used GTK to do the rendering; in practice this meant using GTK for event handling and widget layout too, and made building the desired API around GTK very difficult; an additional issue with this approach is that GTK libs can be difficult to install on some platforms
• kas_rgx used RGX as a rendering API allowing custom widget rendering with a "mid-level graphics API"; ultimately this proved less flexible than desired while also lacking high-level drawing routines (e.g. pretty frames)

Thus, KAS has now moved to direct use of wgpu and wgpu_glyph for rendering, providing its own high-level abstractions (the Draw* traits provided by kas and kas_wgpu). This still needs fleshing out (more drawing primitives, a better text API, and support for custom pipes & shaders), but looks to be a viable path forward.

Themes

A "theme" provides widget sizing and drawing implementations over the above Draw* traits as well as a choice of fonts (and eventually icons).

Currently a single SampleTheme is provided, along with a custom theme example.

Copyright and Licence

The file includes a list of contributors who claim copyright on this project. This list may be incomplete; new contributors may optionally add themselves to this list.

The KAS library is published under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. You may obtain a copy of this licence from the file or on the following webpage: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0