Druid is an experimental Rust-native UI toolkit. Its main goal is to demonstrate the potential of Rust as an application programming language, while letting users write fast, small, and generally efficient programs with minimal hassle.

Druid's current development is largely driven by its use in Runebender, a new font editor.

We have been doing periodic releases of druid on crates.io, but it is under active development and its API might change.

Here's a simple counter example app.

use druid::widget::{Align, Button, Column, Label, Padding};
use druid::{AppLauncher, LocalizedString, Widget, WindowDesc};

fn main() {
    let main_window = WindowDesc::new(ui_builder);
    let data = 0_u32;
    AppLauncher::with_window(main_window)
        .use_simple_logger()
        .launch(data)
        .expect("launch failed");
}

fn ui_builder() -> impl Widget<u32> {
    // The label text will be computed based dynamically based on the current locale and count
    let text =
        LocalizedString::new("hello-counter").with_arg("count", |data: &u32, _env| (*data).into());
    let label = Label::new(text);
    let button = Button::new("increment", |_ctx, data, _env| *data += 1);

    let mut col = Column::new();
    col.add_child(Align::centered(Padding::new(5.0, label)), 1.0);
    col.add_child(Padding::new(5.0, button), 1.0);
    col
}

Check out the the examples folder for a more comprehensive demonstration of druid's existing functionality and widgets.

The druid toolkit uses druid-shell for a platform-abstracting application shell. Druid-shell is responsible for starting a native platform runloop, listening to events, converting them into a platform-agnostic representation, and calling a user-provided handler with them.

While druid-shell is being developed with the druid toolkit in mind, it is intended to be general enough that it could be reused by other projects interested in experimenting with Rust GUI. The druid-shell crate includes a couple non-druid examples.

Druid relies on the piet library for drawing and text layout. Piet is a 2D graphics abstraction with multiple backends: piet-direct2d, piet-cairo, and piet-web are currently available, and a GPU backend is planned. In terms of OS support, macOS and Linux use piet-cairo, and Windows uses piet-direct2d.

// Create an arbitrary bezier path
// (base_state.size() returns the size of the layout rect we're painting in)
let mut path = BezPath::new();
path.move_to(Point::ORIGIN);
path.quad_to(
    (80.0, 90.0),
    (base_state.size().width, base_state.size().height),
);
// Create a color
let stroke_color = Color::rgb8(0x00, 0x80, 0x00);
// Stroke the path with thickness 1.0
paint_ctx.stroke(path, &stroke_color, 1.0);

// Rectangles: the path for practical people
let rect = Rect::from_origin_size((10., 10.), (100., 100.));
// Note the Color:rgba8 which includes an alpha channel (7F in this case)
let fill_color = Color::rgba8(0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x7F);
paint_ctx.fill(rect, &fill_color);

Widgets in druid (text boxes, buttons, layout components, etc.) are objects which implement the Widget trait. The trait is parametrized by a type (T) for associated data. All trait methods (paint, layout, event, and update) are provided with access to this data, and in the case of event the reference is mutable, so that events can directly update the data.

Whenever the application data changes, the framework traverses the widget hierarchy with an update method.

All the widget trait methods are provided with a corresponding context (EventCtx, LayoutCtx, PaintCtx, UpdateCtx). The widget can request things and cause actions by calling methods on that context.

In addition, all trait methods are provided with an environment Env, which includes the current theme parameters (colors, dimensions, etc.).

impl<T: Data> Widget<T> for Button<T> {
    fn paint(&mut self, paint_ctx: &mut PaintCtx, base_state: &BaseState, data: &T, env: &Env) {
      ...
    }
    fn layout(
        &mut self,
        layout_ctx: &mut LayoutCtx,
        bc: &BoxConstraints,
        data: &T,
        env: &Env,
    ) -> Size {
      ...
    }
    fn event(&mut self, event: &Event, ctx: &mut EventCtx, data: &mut T, env: &Env) {
      ...
    }
    fn update(&mut self, ctx: &mut UpdateCtx, old_data: Option<&T>, data: &T, env: &Env) {
      ...
    }
}

Druid provides a number of basic utility and layout widgets and it's easy to implement your own. You can also compose widgets into new widgets:

fn build_widget() -> impl Widget<u32> {
    let mut col = Column::new();
    for i in 0..30 {
        let button = Button::new(format!("Button {}", i), Button::noop);
        col.add_child(Padding::new(3.0, button), 0.0);
    }
    Scroll::new(col)
}

Druid's layout protocol is strongly inspired by Flutter's box layout model. In druid, widgets are passed a BoxConstraint that provides them a minimum and maximum size for layout. Widgets are also responsible for computing appropriate constraints for their children if applicable.

Druid uses a Data trait to represent value types. These should be cheap to compare and cheap to clone.

In general, you can use derive to generate a Data impl for your types.

#[derive(Clone, Data)]
struct AppState {
    which: bool,
    value: f64,
}

The Lens datatype gives access to a part of a larger data structure. Like Data, This can be derived.

#[derive(Clone, Data, Lens)]
struct AppState {
    which: bool,
    value: f64,
}

To use the lens, wrap your widget with LensWrap (note the conversion of CamelCase to snake_case):

LensWrap::new(WidgetThatExpectsf64::new(), lenses::app_state::value);

An explicit goal of druid is to be easy to build, so please open an issue if you run into any difficulties. Druid is available on crates.io and should work as a lone dependency (it re-exports all the parts of druid-shell, piet, and kurbo that you'll need):

druid = "0.3.2"

Since druid is currently in fast-evolving state, you might prefer to drink from the firehose:

druid = { git = "https://github.com/xi-editor/druid.git", version = "0.4" }

On macOS, druid requires cairo; if you use homebrew, brew install cairo should be sufficient. Removing this dependency is on the roadmap.

On Linux, druid requires gtk+3; see gtk-rs dependencies for installation instructions.

Druid is only one of many ongoing Rust-native GUI experiments. To mention a few:

• Azul
• Conrod
• Iced
• Makepad
• Moxie
• Reclutch

We gladly accept contributions via GitHub pull requests. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

A very good place to ask questions and discuss development work is our Zulip chat instance, in the #druid channel.

The main authors are Raph Levien and Colin Rofls, with much support from an active and friendly community.