Dear ImGui Reviews and Details

Is Dear ImGui good?

Social recommendations and mentions

• MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C

  No. As much as I would like it to be the case, that is most certainly a poor criteria to evaluate a UI library. Dear ImGui [0] is without a doubt the most prevalent immediate mode UI library. It does not have native accessibility features, but that hasn't stopped companies such as Intel, Meta, IKEA and Google from shipping products built upon it. It's also used in a ton of games. Calling Dear ImGui a toy project... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• Stop the Apple Music app from launching

  I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries.... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago

• strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance

  My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users. Yes, there are thing like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this. Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago

• macOS code injection for fun and no profit (2024)

  Re, iteration: Have you encountered ImGui [0]? It's basically standard when prototyping any sort of graphical application. re, building GUIs in static libraries: As you might expect, folks typically use a library. See Unreal Engine, raylib, godot, qt, etc. Sans that, any sort of 2D graphics library can get the job done with a little work. [0]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

  I read that article a while ago and highly enjoyed it. C# truly has become a very good language for game development and since NativeAOT has become a thing, we will less and less rely on hacks like IL2CPP or BRUTE which transpile the C# IL to C++ such that it can run on JIT restricted platforms like consoles or iOS. I'd really love to go all-in with C# and SDL3 to make an engine-less cross-platform game but I... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• A Broken Heart

  You're clearly well-traveled, but it's unfortunate that none of the frameworks you listed follow the only UI paradigm I actually find enjoyable to work with. Look Immediate Mode UIs when you have some time to kill. It's a famous paradigm in videogame UI development, so unfortunately most publicly available IMGUI libraries are tailored for use in game engine editor tooling (not very style-able, simple layout... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago

• Native Apps with ClojureScript, React and Static Hermes

  What you see in the demo below is ClojureScript UIx app driving native window with ImGui UI via custom React reconciler. Both hot-reloading and REPL-driven development are supported, as you'd expect it from a typical ClojureScript project. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago

• Ned: ImGui Text Editor with GL Shaders

  This is based on the Dear ImGui library/framework [0]. It's not intended, strictly speaking, for standard desktop applications. It's intended for applications that use 3d rendering, like games or CAD. Although you could certainly use it as a desktop editor if you wanted to, I think the real value is in embedding. [0] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• Rust vs. C++ : An Unbiased Comparison

  Amazing for designing GUI applications, thanks to Qt, Dear ImGui, and many more. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago

• Ask HN: What Toolchains Are People Using for Desktop App Development in 2025?

  Within game development it's Dear ImGui. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui Normally with the Windows DX12 backend, sometimes with the SDL+OpenGL backend if you want cross platform support. Other frameworks are sort of disappearing. C++ all the way although some use it with C#. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago

• A brief history of Mac primary coding languages

  Ugh, yes, I could not wrap my mind around QML either. I've dabbled in SwiftUI as a hobbyist and find it generally easy to use, though I do agree that the traditional Storyboard approach is easier to wrap my head around (also an amateur hobbyist there, with emphasis on amateur). My experience is that iteration and development speed in SwiftUI is noticeably faster, but once your app reaches some level of... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• The JavaScript Runtime Handbook - Deno, Bun and Node.js in 10 minutes

  Extensibility - Can I hook into the runtime's? Load native binaries? Inject C++ or Rust where it matters? That’s how I built imgui.js, a threaded and sparse set powered C++ GUI framework over dear imgui for Node:. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago

• Open Source Can't Coordinate

  Nah, we all know the "real-life CDE" is called either OpenGL (see ImGui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui etc) or... HTML/CSS/JS (see Electron, Tauri etc). - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)

  I find the imgui UIs to be very high density (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui. It seems the game dev community has pretty powerful tools to understand and interrogate their work. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

• Lumix - a .NET open source ableton like DAW

  The user interface has been entirely developed using immediate mode gui dear-imgui library, with the ImGui.NET wrapper. This allows for a fast and bloat free experience but, at the same time, harder customization for a task of this size, since the library isn't really suited to the development of end-user applications. On the other side, it's what I'm most familiar to work with. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago

• What do you think about using a game engine for UI?

  I've recently had a lot of fun/success with Dear ImGui (C++) -- not a game engine, but originally/partly meant for use in them. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago

• Microui+fenster=Small GUI

  Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome. Maybe a dumb question, but why not Imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Building cross-platform GUI apps in Rust using egui

  The most well known immediate mode GUI framework, which egui is also inspired by, is Dear imgui. The egui repository also has a section on the trade offs when it comes to immediate mode GUIs, which I would definitely recommend you check out. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago

• Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead

  > I switched from C++ to C about 7 years ago and never looked back I'm definitely considering the same, and you're right - it's not C++ itself that appeals to me at all, it's the libraries. I'm not sure what C libraries I'd use for collections (instead of the STL and Abseil [0]), or in lieu of CLI11 [1] or Dear ImGui [2]. [0] https://abseil.io/about/design/swisstables [1] https://github.com/CLIUtils/CLI11. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago

• Plausible Community Edition

  I think that world still exists. We're on HN, so there's always going to be a business/startup bias in what we talk about and share here. And doubly so if someone develops a product as open source with a commercial offering to support it from the get go. Off the top of my head, Imgui[0] is an example of an open source project, widely used, developed by a small group with a main contributor. AssetCooker [1] is a... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago

• Immediate Mode GUI Programming

  The Dear ImGui readme is a good starting point: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui ...now of course Dear ImGui is a specific implementation of an immediate mode UI framework, but it's also the most popular implementation. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago