bWidgets

bWidgets is a cross-platform core widget toolkit, designed specifically for Blender, but reusable as a standalone library.

NOTE: This is not an official Blender project!

Unlike other toolkits, bWidgets does not contain window management, event management, graphics libraries, font management and the like. It is solely focused on core widget features: Widget types, layouts, styling, interaction.

Mission & Goals

Mission: Explore new design ideas & technology for a new era of Blender UI development; start with a blank canvas.

The fundamental goals in relation to Blender are:

• Solve long standing design issues & technical debt. Apply lessons learnt from the current design.
  • Keep good working designs! Enrich the UI design paradigms, don’t fight them.
• Extend UI design vocabulary & functionality: Animations, drag & drop, greatly improved theming, multi-line widgets, etc.
• Better tooling for UI development: Clear specifications, comprehensive documentation, hugely increased testability, Blender UI builder app (later on).
• Standalone widget toolkit, adaptable by other Blender projects for a unified look & feel.
• Bring fun back to Blender UI coding!

Further Documentation

• Documentation landing page (subpages contain source-code documentation).
• High level code design documentation.
• Build instructions.

Licensing

bWidgets itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2 or later. This is a temporary solution because it contains snippets from GPL licensed Blender code.
Further contributions will be dual-licensed under GPL2 (or later) and the MIT license (see LICENSE.txt) until further notice. It is planned to switch to license that allows usage in non-GPL projects too, e.g. an MIT-like license.

The demo application is permanently licensed under GPL2 or later. Everything else (namely documentation and unit tests) uses the MIT license, except for bundled third party libraries for which license files can be found together with the library code.

Supported Platforms

bWidgets itself only requires a compiler supporting the C++11 ABI.
The demo application however requires Freetype2 and OpenGL 3.3 to compile/run.

bWidgets and its demo application have successfully been built on following platforms:

• Linux Debian 9, GCC 6.3
• Windows 7, MSVC 2017 (only compiled, couldn't launch due to OpenGL driver issues)
• Windows 10, MSVC 2017
• macOS Big Sur 11.2

More platforms/compilers should be tested.