Progress Reports and Feedback

[Avey777]

I'll keep an eye on this, anytime it makes big progress, you can post an announcement to let us know

[mike-ward]

I'll post periodic updates on the project here.

• The layout engine code is holding up well. The examples do their best to break it.
• column-scroll.v scrolls 10K lines of text. It runs OK unoptimized. Add -prod to the build, and it smooths out. Tried 100,000 lines, but it gets too janky. There is no list virtualization being done.
• One of my goals is to ensure text layout and manipulation work well. Selecting text anywhere and not just input views was a priority. It's a mundane but important feature that is difficult to get right. I've tackled many of them, but a few remain, including text selection in a scrolling container and scrolling when text selection goes beyond the visual borders. Browsers make this look effortless, but I'm finding it challenging.
• Floating elements are a recent addition. With six anchor and attachment points, there are many options for placement.
• Theme management was added recently. I was going to wait until later to add it. I'm glad I didn't. I'm finding themes are messy little devils.
• Focus management is often overlooked or not addressed until later. Again, messy subject. I've opted to bubble events up from the bottom. This is how browsers do it, I think.
• Thread management can be a real pain in UI's. My goal is to hide that from developers. The draw loop only references renders and not views or generated Shape trees. This design appears to be holding up so far.
• API reference docs can be generated with make doc. Read them with make read
• I've also started to write some docs in the Docs folder.
• Added two scripts, _check.vsh and _build.vsh. Example: v run _build.vsh builds all the examples.

That's enough for this entry. I'll try to post here more often.

[mike-ward]

I've been working on scrollbars for the last few days. Boy, are these things messy. I opted to make them floating elements. This has some advantages, including placement and the ability to overlay content if desired. I've seen scrollbars overlayed in other programs, and when done right, they are effective.

Scrollbars have some subtle behaviors I never noticed until trying to implement one. Focus management is somewhat perplexing, and then there's mouse locking. Oddly, the scrollbars are more challenging than the actual content scrolling. scroll-demo.v has scrollbars enabled. Check them out.

[mike-ward]

Decided to take a break for scrolling and text marking to have a bit of fun with progress bars by adding text percent.

[Avey777]

Great job (¯▽`)👍

[mike-ward]

Scrollbars are done now, including horizontal scrollbars. I'm not a big fan of scrollbars, so they are optional with scrolling. On the plus side, they did smoke out a few bugs in my scrolling logic and even a performance gremlin. The second video is a column scroll with 10K lines of text! No virtualization and no compiler optimizations. If you look closely, you can see a lag here and there. Those lags disappear when compiler optimizations are turned on.

Screen.Recording.2025-05-07.at.11.47.20.AM.mov

Screen.Recording.2025-05-07.at.11.46.12.AM.mov

[mike-ward]

Work on the menus is coming along nicely. The implementation is surprisingly small (350 LOC). One of the neat features of menu items is that they are containers. As a container, a menu item can have custom content. Not just text or an icon, but any view you can dream up. The help menu in the demo includes a search box for demonstration purposes.

Notice that when the mouse cursor leaves the submenu (Top Left menu item at the end), the item unselects, but the submenu remains. This was one of those behaviors I never noticed in other apps until I started implementing menus. It was hard to get this behavior. It was only 10 LOC, but it cooked my brain to figure it out.

There are subtitles in the 'Move & Size' submenu. There is no special logic here because menu items are so flexible (hint, it's just a disabled menu item), but I did add some styling options and a helper method to make them easy to add.

And just to show off, the whole menubar is a floating element in this demo (they don't have to be floating, of course). It's attached to the top-center of the window, but it could go anywhere.

There are a plethora of styling parameters for menubars. In this demo, the menubar is styled differently (no border, square corners) from the submenus (borders, rounded corners).

There is no keyboard handling at the moment. I fact, keyboard handling in general is limited. I need to address that at some point, including customized key-bindings. Long way to go yet...

Screen.Recording.2025-05-11.at.8.56.12.AM.mov

[mike-ward]

A few days ago, I created a document viewer (see the examples folder) to support the documentation I'm writing (located in the docs folder). It's almost child's play to write something like this in Gui. As simple as this example app is, it revealed a surprising number of bugs around my text handling. One of the goals of Gui is to handle text well, so I was disappointed that something so simple could wreck things.

I overlooked several things:

• Tab expansions
• Plain multiline text. Gui could wrap text with or without collapsing spaces, but I did not have a mode for multilined text as is.
• White space handling other than \n and space
• Bugs in the text splitter
• Scrolling bug (which I have yet to fix at the time of this writing)

Writing small example apps has helped ferret out issues. If you have ideas for other example apps, please do suggest them. Or better yet, send a pull request.

Screen.Recording.2025-05-13.at.12.mp4

[tauraamui]

Please implement a markdown renderer.

[mike-ward]

Added some toggle views today. Toggles are views used to turn something on or off. Currently, Gui has three: toggle (aka checkbox), radio, and switch. Those are the three I commonly see. Please let me know if additional toggles are needed. They are relatively easy to author. The most challenging part is all the styling options.

Screen.Recording.2025-05-15.at.11.10.06.AM.mov

[Avey777]

Looking at your project, I feel that v writing gui is okay.

[mike-ward]

Range sliders are way more challenging than I imagined. Of course, whenever you get into mouse-dragging operations, things can get complicated. Lots of options for coloring the different bits; keyboard, mouse, and mouse-wheel support as well. Learned a lot about my own framework writing this one LOL.

Screen.Recording.2025-05-18.at.8.20.49.AM.mov

[mike-ward]

Taking a break from implementing Select Dropdowns and updating the Gallery app (examples/gallery.v). I'll try to keep this current so you'll know what's implemented so far.

Screen.Recording.2025-05-22.at.10.42.25.AM.copy.mov

[mike-ward]

There be icons! These are the popular feather icons. Also added standard theme fonts of icon1, icon2..., similar to the n,b, i, and m fonts. The hardest part was creating the metadata (name, char pairs). Odd that they don't provide them.

Screen.Recording.2025-05-24.at.7.43.26.AM.mov