KAS GUI

KAS, the toolKit Abstraction System, is a general-purpose GUI toolkit. KAS's design provides:

• retained mode (library stores state), inspired by Qt (classic)
• concise, partially declarative specification of widgets
• type-safe, widget-local event handlers
• simple ownership with no retained pointers into widget state
• widgets embed state and handlers (easy reuse of complex components)
• scalability to millions of widgets (WIP)

Examples

For details, see the Examples README.

Features

• Touchscreen input, mouse input, full keyboard navigation, accelerator keys
• Bidirectional text support and complex glyph shaping via [HarfBuzz]
• Scalable (HiDPI) supporting fractional scaling
• Themes (sizing and rendering control) and colour schemes
• Embedded graphics via custom [WebGPU] graphics pipes
• Widget layout via grids (with spans), rows and columns
• Idempotent widget resizing

Missing features

These aren't here yet!

• Raster graphics
• Flow-box layouts
• Rich text formatting
• CPU and OpenGL rendering (currently only supports drawing via [WebGPU], which should support most modern systems but not all)
• User-configuration and desktop integration
• And much more, see the [ROADMAP].

Widgets

Below are some highlights. Find the full list in the docs.

• Single- and multi-line text editing via EditBox
• ScrollRegion with ScrollBars
• Resizable List and Splitter with drag handles
• MenuBar featuring all expected input methods
• RadioBox with broadcast communication via a group identifier
• A simple MessageBox dialog

Installation and dependencies

Rust

KAS requires [Rust] version 1.45 or greater. All examples are compatible with the stable channel, but using the nightly channel does have a couple of advantages:

• Proceedural macros emit better diagnostics. In some cases, diagnostics are missed without nightly rustc, hence nightly is recommended for development.
• Documentation generated via cargo doc requires nightly for links
• A few minor option things: see Feature flags below.

WebGPU

Currently, KAS's only drawing method is [WebGPU] which requires DirectX 11/12, Vulkan or Metal. In the future, there may be support for OpenGL and software rendering.

HarfBuzz (optional)

This is only needed if the shaping feature is enabled. On my system, the following libraries are used: libharfbuzz.so.0, libglib-2.0.so.0, libgraphite2.so.3 and libpcre.so.1.

Quick-start

Install dependencies:

```sh

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libharfbuzz-dev

For Fedora:

glslc is optional; see kas-wgpu/README.md

sudo dnf install libxcb-devel harfbuzz-devel glslc ```

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

git clone https://github.com/kas-gui/kas.git cd kas cargo test cd kas-wgpu cargo build --examples cargo run --example gallery cargo run --example layout cargo run --example mandlebrot

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 for proc macros (do not use directly)
• [kas-text]: font loading, text layout, text navigation
• kas-theme: theming support for KAS (API plus two themes; organisation may change)
• kas-wgpu: provides windowing via [winit] and rendering via [WebGPU]
• kas-widgets: (unrealised) - providing extra widgets

A user depends on kas to write their complete UI specification, selects a theme from kas-theme, instances a kas_wgpu::Toolkit, adds the window(s), and runs the UI.

Feature flags

The kas crate has the following feature flags:

• shaping: enables complex glyph forming for languages such as Arabic. This requires that the HarfBuzz library is installed.
• internal_doc: turns on some extra documentation intended for internal usage but not for end users. (This only affects generated documentation.)
• winit: adds compatibility code for winit's event and geometry types. This is currently the only functional windowing/event library.
• stack_dst: some compatibility impls (see kas-theme's documentation)

Copyright and Licence

The COPYRIGHT 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 LICENSE file or on the following webpage: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0