Docking / Dock Panel Layout

[Flix01]

[ADMIN] EDIT: There is now an official docking branch. See #2109 for details.

I'd like to see if somebody is interested in a Mini Dock Panel Layout: I implemented a very basic one a few months ago (I still have to port my code to the new version of ImGui).

This is an old screenshot of what it looked:

Basically it just supports one docked window per side, with a "hover" window (when the mouse hovers the buttons that are not active), with no animation and no drag and drop at all, and no re-arrangeable buttons and windows.

This is very limited compared to a "full featured" dock panel implementation but it's better than nothing and is OK for my needs (although it's currently just a proof of the concept not tested for real usage).

[thennequin]

I start to create mine too, but it's more like an small window framework who used ImGui than an extensions for ImGui.
And thanks Omar for created an easy and powerful gui lib ;)

[extrawurst]

@thennequin that looks awesome! ;)

[codz01]

@thennequin thats really great .

[Flix01]

Hands down: @thennequn that's much better than mine!

[Pagghiu]

@thennequin this is great stuff!

[ocornut]

Really cool. Thibault's code is here:
https://github.com/thennequin/ImWindow

[ocornut]

@thennequin I'd be curious to hear about what you've learned / think about the current architecture you've developed. It looks interesting and I'd eventually want to incorporate some form of docking into ImGui. Do you think some aspect of it could be adapted to be included in the core library? How could ImGui evolve to support that sort of extension more naturally?

[thennequin]

Thanks everybody.

@ocornut I wanted to make one simple way to create windows for easily create editors for the company where I work. Actually, the scene editor of our engine (it's PlayAll, maybe you've heard about this at Darkworks :) ) is based on old technologies and it's slow and very hard to evolve, so we want to recreate it from scratch.
We are searching for a good alternative for implementing new features easily but during our research we couldn't find a good and light alternative to our old version of wxWidgets used in our scene editor.
Last year i learnt to use Unity and make custom tools, it was easy to make new windows just by instancing class who inherited from Editor class, it's just perfect for our needs.
So my current architecture is probably based on the ImGui of Unity.
At first i created a new widget for wxWidgets for use wxAUI (docking system of wxWidgets) but this attempt had many problems so i started to create this library from scratch and your samples.
My goal is to use your library without modifications, so i won't search a way to include dock system directly in ImGui. I don't know where to start, but if you want to include dock system, i think you can look at the class ImwContainer.

[Flix01]

Just to say that I added my worse implementation (the first screenshot of this thread) here: https://github.com/Flix01/imgui, together with other (mostly outdated and non-functional) ImGui "addon widgets".

[Edit:] Live Demo Here (proof-of-the-concept test demo of my mini imgui panel manager, with a custom font).

I also made a wiki page of my addon branch here: Addons Wiki .

[ocornut]

@Flix01 Thanks! always useful to have more example/reference code available.

@thennequin Branimir has reworked your code here (haven't looked at it in details yet myself)
imgui_wm.cpp / .h in this folder:
https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx/tree/master/3rdparty/ocornut-imgui

• Made it single compile unit .h/.cpp file.
• Fixed internals to use ImGui utility functions and macros instead of custom ones
• Made input and window handling use data passed to ImGui::IO structure.

I heard of PlayAll (it is a french middleware partly developed by Darkworks) but never seen it. Did we met at Darkworks? I only spent sometimes like 9 weeks there in the summer of 2008, so I don't recall everyone :)

I don't know when I'll be able to tackle docking but it's very good to have those different attempts working.

[thennequin]

@ocornut Indeed, he reduced my lib into a pair of files. That's pretty cool, but i will still continue to use my multi files structure for a possible growth.

I worked at Darkworks at that time but we couldn't meet each other because there were over a hundred people at the company, it's impossible to get to know everyone.

Branimir use only one RenderWindow. So when he docked a WIndow ouside of his RenderWindow, he lost it because he didn't recreate a new RenderWindow, It can be a future feature for my lib to restrict the number of RenderWindow.

[Flix01]

Just to say that I'm doing something like @thennequin (I'm on Linux, I cannot use his code!) using imgui only.

It's still W.I.P. and I don't know if it will work across different imgui windows. [Edit:] it works, see updated gif.

However here is a preliminary animated .gif:

P.S. Some buttons shaped like tab labels would be useful...

Happy new year to all imgui users (and to the developer) !

[thennequin]

It seems pretty cool :)