Iced is a lower level GUI library, similar to what GDK is to GTK. We built our own COSMIC-themed GUI toolkit around iced, which is called libcosmic. As we’ve gotten more and more widgets and application logic developed, actual application development with libcosmic is a breeze. Even if you do have to create a custom widget, it’s much easier to creating custom widgets in GTK. We’re able to develop much faster than we ever could with GTK now.
Yew and Leptos aren’t comparable since they’re not native GUI toolkits. These are for web developers rather than application development. It wouldn’t be possible to use this for developing layer shell applets for COSMIC, either.
This sounds really cool. I don’t see any documentation for libcosmic. Are you planning to promote it as an alternative toolkit for building desktop apps or do you see it more as an internal tool strictly for COSMIC DE development?
You can generate documentation by running cargo doc and browsing the generated web pages in target/doc. There are also examples in the examples directory of libcosmic, as well as a design demo example which is a WIP.
libcosmic is an alternative toolkit for building desktop applications and layer shell applets. It wouldn’t make much sense to build a toolkit only for ourselves. It’s the best way to develop layer shell applets for COSMIC, and other Wayland compositors that support the layer shell protocol.
Why develop libcosmic around iced instead of going with something else modern that’s easy to develop in such as Flutter? Iced/libcosmic is probably a bit more efficient resource-wise but that probably wasn’t a huge point.
Iced is a lower level GUI library, similar to what GDK is to GTK. We built our own COSMIC-themed GUI toolkit around iced, which is called libcosmic. As we’ve gotten more and more widgets and application logic developed, actual application development with libcosmic is a breeze. Even if you do have to create a custom widget, it’s much easier to creating custom widgets in GTK. We’re able to develop much faster than we ever could with GTK now.
Yew and Leptos aren’t comparable since they’re not native GUI toolkits. These are for web developers rather than application development. It wouldn’t be possible to use this for developing layer shell applets for COSMIC, either.
This sounds really cool. I don’t see any documentation for libcosmic. Are you planning to promote it as an alternative toolkit for building desktop apps or do you see it more as an internal tool strictly for COSMIC DE development?
As of today, https://pop-os.github.io/libcosmic/cosmic/ is now available.
You can generate documentation by running
cargo docand browsing the generated web pages intarget/doc. There are also examples in the examples directory of libcosmic, as well as a design demo example which is a WIP.libcosmic is an alternative toolkit for building desktop applications and layer shell applets. It wouldn’t make much sense to build a toolkit only for ourselves. It’s the best way to develop layer shell applets for COSMIC, and other Wayland compositors that support the layer shell protocol.
Why develop libcosmic around iced instead of going with something else modern that’s easy to develop in such as Flutter? Iced/libcosmic is probably a bit more efficient resource-wise but that probably wasn’t a huge point.