native-gui
MoonBit 跨平台桌面 GUI 框架：一套代码直出 Windows / Linux / macOS 原生窗口，托盘/通知/快捷键/输入法/自启等系统能力开箱即用
gui
desktop
native
cross-platform
moonbit
Author
Version
0.3.2
License
MIT
Repository
Last updated
10 minutes ago
Downloads
155
#native-gui
A cross-platform desktop GUI framework for MoonBit — one codebase ships native windows on Windows / Linux / macOS, desktop capabilities ready to use. Windows, pixels, the event loop, layout and every widget belong to the library itself and are written in pure MoonBit.
Formerly moonbit-libyue (renamed 2026-10). The mooncakes package is NoahLiu/native-gui and all existing import paths are unchanged.
#Highlights
- 🖥 Full system surfaces — tray, notifications, global shortcuts, clipboard, native menus, file dialogs, drag & drop, autostart and other everyday desktop capabilities work out of the box, plus system queries for volume / power / wallpaper / monitors / printers.
- 🎨 Consistent look, lightweight — no heavyweight graphics engine; the same widget appearance on all three platforms, with small artifacts and fast startup. Follows the system light/dark mode and accent colour by default, theme fully customizable; built-in control text is localizable (English and Chinese ship with the package).
- 📊 A complete widget set — layout primitives, form controls, interactive charts and Markdown rendering; the separate gui-media adds audio/video playback and display, and gui-webview adds web rendering on the system webview.
- 📝 Declarative UI with reactive state — the interface is described as a tree, mounted in one mount_window call; state lives in Store / Signal, and bound spots refresh with the data.
#Usage
moon add NoahLiu/native-guiThe library builds only for the native target: set preferred_target = "native" in moon.mod and supported_targets = "native" in the executable package's moon.pkg. Import the packages you need in moon.pkg (e.g. NoahLiu/native-gui/ui as @ui) and mount a window:
fn main {
let app = match @ui.mount_window(
[@ui.text("Hello, MoonBit!", font_size=18.0)],
title="Hello, MoonBit!",
width=400,
height=300,
) {
None => return // no window backend or no display service on this host
Some(a) => a
}
app.run()
}Runnable examples in this repository, from shallow to deep — every directory under examples/ is a standalone module, so cd in and moon run .:
cd examples/hello && MOON_WORK=off moon run .MOON_WORK=off resolves the example against the published library from the registry, so no other workspace member's prebuild runs; drop it to build against your own working-tree changes.
- examples/hello — a minimal window
- examples/showcase — full demo board: components + system probes + extended charts, 15 pages
- examples/browser — embedded WebView browser (demo menu + status bar)
- examples/sysmonitor — system monitor: overview, processes, disks, network and sensors
Each showcase page is its own source file under examples/showcase/pages/ — the best copy-paste material library.
#Packages
| Import | Alias | Contents |
|---|---|---|
| NoahLiu/native-gui/base | @base | Platform-free primitives: Store / Signal / ListStore, focus stack, key codes, tick/prof |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/shell | @shell | System-capability shell: menus, global hotkeys, tray, notifications, reveal, the loop scheduler and read-only platform probes |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/widget | @widget | Self-drawn widget host: layout mapping, hit-testing, event routing, paint walk, declarative Node, overlays, drag & drop, input mapping, the App pump |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/ui | @ui | Self-drawn widgets and the component library: forms, display, navigation, date, tables & virtual lists, entries, scroll, overlays, code view, declarative layer |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/render | @render | Rasterizer — a pure-MoonBit software raster (path / fill / blend / gradient) plus a Cairo backend; bitmaps, canvas, images, PNG |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/text | @text | Text layer: font families, fonts, attributed text and range attributes (Pango / DirectWrite) |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/theme | @theme | Theme system: palette derivation + change subscription |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/icons | @icons | Vector icon system (800+ icons) |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/sys | @sys | OS capabilities: autostart, idle, subprocesses, environment, files, JSON, dialogs, browser history / bookmarks, recent files, wallpaper, volume, power plans, printers, monitors, window controls, app lookup |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/input | @input | Editing core and key codes |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/win | @win | Platform window backend (Win32 / GTK3 C stubs) |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/dbus | @dbus | Linux D-Bus bridge (tray SNI, notifications, logind / upower, media, network…) |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/chart | @chart | Charts plus the interactive layer |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/mdview | @mdview | Markdown rendering view |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/style | @style | Style layer: stylesheets as MoonBit values — Style rule blocks, hover / active / focus states, transitions |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/i18n | @i18n | UI text i18n: TOML catalog lookup with interpolation and plurals, subscribable language switching; built-in control text ships in English and Chinese |
| NoahLiu/native-gui/router | @router | Single-window page routing: route tree, per-level selected keys and link bindings — any component can navigate via on_link |
Optional capabilities in separate modules (a plain moon add of this module never drags them in):
| Module | Contents |
|---|---|
| NoahLiu/gui-media | Audio/video engine (ffmpeg decode + miniaudio output) and the player component |
| NoahLiu/gui-webview | Embedded WebView (WebKitGTK / WebView2), extracted from this module's web subpackage on 2026-10-16 |
#Platform support
| Windows | Linux | macOS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status | ✅ 10 / 11 | ✅ X11 mainline | ✅ Apple Silicon, verified on device |
| Notes | GUI-subsystem exe: double-click opens no console window | Ubuntu 24.04 and Deepin 23 / 25 verified; Deepin 20 is not a support target until MoonBit fixes it. Wayland sessions run, X11-dependent capabilities degrade per session | Cocoa / CoreText / ImageIO / WKWebView; verified on Apple Silicon with the same checklist as Windows / Linux |
#Roadmap
Where this library is heading (see the public roadmap for the full picture):
- Rendering performance — an optional GPU-composited backend (WebGPU), per-widget GPU drawing, per-frame redraw scoping, layout caching and incremental chart redraws.
- Windows — key-routing fallback after in-window page switches, so keystrokes reach the page after navigation.
- Input & overlays — selection and copy for static text (read-only editor with hit-testing, selection highlight and Ctrl+C / context-menu copy).
- Further content — an embeddable terminal widget, a GPU content canvas host (WebGPU).
Explicit non-goals: GTK4 / Qt backends, and platform-native widget skins — the self-drawn stack is the product. Accessibility (screen readers) goes through self-built bridges (NSAccessibility / AT-SPI / UIA, planned), not inherited from native widgets.
Versioning: at 0.x the interfaces still evolve per batch; breaking changes are recorded in commit messages and the docs ship in the same batch.
#Documentation
- Repository root README — architecture, package map, contributing and gates
- Documentation site — usage docs, Chinese version under /zh/
- Public roadmap (Chinese) — positioning, support matrix, commitments, non-goals
MIT License.
Install
Download zipMoonBit 跨平台桌面 GUI 框架：一套代码直出 Windows / Linux / macOS 原生窗口，托盘/通知/快捷键/输入法/自启等系统能力开箱即用
guidesktopnativecross-platformmoonbit
MIT
Updated 10 minutes ago
155 downloads