KAS GUI

KAS, the toolKit Abstraction System, is a general-purpose GUI toolkit. Goals of the project are:

• Fully-functional, intuitive GUIs
• Embeddable within games or any window manager
• Fancy/highly flexible hardware-accelerated rendering (but in theory software rendering could be supported too)
• Easy, expressive specification within code (currently impeded by Rust language limitations which will hopefully be solved in the future)
• Custom widgets in user code without limitations
• Bug-free, with an API facilitating compiler correctness lints
• High performance / low resource usage, other than optional fancy graphics

Status of the project is alpha: progress has been made towards all goals, with signficiant limitations to features and goofy graphics. Portability is somewhat limited, requiring nightly Rust and [wgpu] support.

Crates:

• kas: the core of the GUI library, providing most interfaces and logic along with a selection of common widgets
• kas_macros: a helper crate providing the procedural macros used by kas
• kas_wgpu: provides windowing via [winit] and rendering via [wgpu]
• kas_widgets: (unrealised) - providing extra widgets
• kas_graphs: (unrealised) - plotting widgets

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

Examples

Installation and Testing

For the most part, Cargo should take care of dependencies, but note:

• shaderc may require some setup
• wgpu requires DirectX 11/12, Vulkan or Metal (in the future it may support OpenGL)

Next, clone the repository and run the examples as follows:

git clone https://github.com/dhardy/kas.git cd kas cargo test cd kas-wgpu cargo test cargo run --example gallery

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)
• Column / row / grid+span layouts (TODO: flow boxes, manual positioning)
• Width-for-height sizing
• Custom themes (with full control of sizing and rendering)
• Touch-screen support
• Keyboard navigation & accelerator keys
• Scalable (HiDPI) including fractional scaling
• Memory and CPU efficient

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