94b75f3ad9
Move the SetLayeredWindowAttributes call to immediately after window construction, and initialize it with per-pixel transparency settings, no color key and no global blending. The render pipeline will perform alpha blending during compositing. Cleaned up the DWM acrylic API calls some, to explicitly set to the three appropriate modes depending on opaque, transparent or blurred settings. The API internally hides versioning concerns from the caller. Set the window class background color to black, this prevents a flashbang on slow startup, e.g. debug builds on a heavily loaded system. The outcome is that the window no longer receives paint demands for underlying window updates, while also having per-pixel transparency - opaque theme elements are now correctly opaque. The transparency settings are now portable across windows and macOS having mostly similar outcomes (modulo palette differences). Small fonts may still appear to be alpha blended - this seems to be in the glyph atlas, their pixels are not actually opaque. Larger fonts (or higher DPIs) don't suffer this and are as opaque as expected. Layering the window atop one that is rendering at 120fps, the editor window can drop to its 8fps idle state, while still being composited with 120fps alpha blend in the background, in both blur and transparent modes. Updates #20400 Release Notes: - Improved transparency on Windows to be more efficient, support fully opaque elements and more closely match other platforms. |
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| README.md | ||
Welcome to GPUI!
GPUI is a hybrid immediate and retained mode, GPU accelerated, UI framework for Rust, designed to support a wide variety of applications.
Getting Started
GPUI is still in active development as we work on the Zed code editor and isn't yet on crates.io. You'll also need to use the latest version of stable Rust and be on macOS or Linux. Add the following to your Cargo.toml:
gpui = { git = "https://github.com/zed-industries/zed" }
Everything in GPUI starts with an Application. You can create one with Application::new(), and kick off your application by passing a callback to Application::run(). Inside this callback, you can create a new window with App::open_window(), and register your first root view. See gpui.rs for a complete example.
Dependencies
GPUI has various system dependencies that it needs in order to work.
macOS
On macOS, GPUI uses Metal for rendering. In order to use Metal, you need to do the following:
- Install Xcode from the macOS App Store, or from the Apple Developer website. Note this requires a developer account.
Ensure you launch XCode after installing, and install the macOS components, which is the default option.
-
Install Xcode command line tools
xcode-select --install -
Ensure that the Xcode command line tools are using your newly installed copy of Xcode:
sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
The Big Picture
GPUI offers three different registers depending on your needs:
-
State management and communication with
Entity's. Whenever you need to store application state that communicates between different parts of your application, you'll want to use GPUI's entities. Entities are owned by GPUI and are only accessible through an owned smart pointer similar to anRc. See theapp::contextmodule for more information. -
High level, declarative UI with views. All UI in GPUI starts with a view. A view is simply an
Entitythat can be rendered, by implementing theRendertrait. At the start of each frame, GPUI will call this render method on the root view of a given window. Views build a tree ofelements, lay them out and style them with a tailwind-style API, and then give them to GPUI to turn into pixels. See thedivelement for an all purpose swiss-army knife of rendering. -
Low level, imperative UI with Elements. Elements are the building blocks of UI in GPUI, and they provide a nice wrapper around an imperative API that provides as much flexibility and control as you need. Elements have total control over how they and their child elements are rendered and can be used for making efficient views into large lists, implement custom layouting for a code editor, and anything else you can think of. See the
elementmodule for more information.
Each of these registers has one or more corresponding contexts that can be accessed from all GPUI services. This context is your main interface to GPUI, and is used extensively throughout the framework.
Other Resources
In addition to the systems above, GPUI provides a range of smaller services that are useful for building complex applications:
-
Actions are user-defined structs that are used for converting keystrokes into logical operations in your UI. Use this for implementing keyboard shortcuts, such as cmd-q. See the
actionmodule for more information. -
Platform services, such as
quit the apporopen a URLare available as methods on theapp::App. -
An async executor that is integrated with the platform's event loop. See the
executormodule for more information., -
The
[gpui::test]macro provides a convenient way to write tests for your GPUI applications. Tests also have their own kind of context, aTestAppContextwhich provides ways of simulating common platform input. Seeapp::test_contextandtestmodules for more details.
Currently, the best way to learn about these APIs is to read the Zed source code, ask us about it at a fireside hack, or drop a question in the Zed Discord. We're working on improving the documentation, creating more examples, and will be publishing more guides to GPUI on our blog.