Thunderclap

A Rust toolkit to write decomposable and fast user interfaces. It is:

• Event-driven: Thunderclap builds efficient abstractions over the Reclutch event system to avoid unnecessary computations.
• Simple: Thunderclap provides a suite of widgets alongside various infrastructures to simplify writing your own widgets.
• Customizable: There isn't a single line of hard-coded widget rendering; trivial widgets are fully parameterized and non-trivial widgets delegate to a provided theme.

Overview

Thunderclap aims to take the traditional widget hierarchy model from bulletproof libraries (e.g. Qt) and combine it with the cutting-edge simplicity of modern toolkits (e.g. Flutter). To accomplish this it provides three primary high-level components:

• A widget library that fills the need for boilerplate UI components.
• A theme API with a verbose typography and color scheme protocol.
• A macro to emulate a declarative UI syntax for widget creation.

The high-level UI code semantics are identical to that of XAML's. This implies several features;

• Widgets that are explicitly given a name map to fields of the widget type (x:Name="name" becomes as name, then self.name).
• Widget properties can be optionally set, falling back to a default value (property="value" becomes property=value).
• Binding to events is done directly in the high-level syntax (Event="handler"becomes @event { handler }).

The biggest difference is that XAML is stored in an external file, however Thunderclap parses input from a macro directly in code.

Example

There's also an in-depth overview of the code below.

use thunderclap::{
    app, base,
    themes::Primer,
    ui::{Button, Label, VStack},
};

rooftop! {
    struct Counter: () {
        fn build(
            count: i32 = 0,
        ) {
            VStack() {
                Label(
                    text=bind(format!("Count: {}", bind.count).into()),
                    wrap=false,
                ),
                Button(text="Count Up")
                    @press {
                        widget.data.count += 1;
                    },
                Button(text="Count Down")
                    @press {
                        widget.data.count -= 1;
                    },
            }
        }
    }
}

fn main() {
    let app = app::create(
        |_, display| Primer::new(display).unwrap(), // theme
        |u_aux, g_aux, theme| {
            Counter {
                // Perhaps we want to start counting from 5 instead of 0
                count: 5,
                ..Counter::from_theme(theme)
            }.construct(theme, u_aux, g_aux)
        },
        app::AppOptions {
            name: "Counter App".into(),
            ..Default::default()
        },
    ).unwrap();
    app.start(|_| None);
}

---

You can see a rundown of all the widgets here.

Theme List (so far)

• GitHub Primer

Widget List (so far)

• Button
• Vertical Stack
• Container
• Label
• Checkbox
• Horizontal Stack
• Text area
• Margins
• Max Fill

Project State

Still very early in development, however the core code is now at a usable point where you can branch off and develop your own widgets. Provided widget suite is in active development.

License

Thunderclap is licensed under either

• Apache 2.0
• MIT

at your choosing.