GUI lib for Crystal-lang allowing for developing simple desktop apps using Crystal-lang.

• Expressive (JSX-like).
• Concise (it's like writing HTML).
• Modular (A custom visual widget can include other custom widgets)
• Stylable using regular CSS.
• Easy layout coding.
• Easy state management of the app.
• Ajax support.

Built on :

• Blueprint: https://github.com/stephannv/blueprint
• Webview for Crystal : https://github.com/naqvis/webview
• Pico CSS : https://picocss.coma
• HTMX : https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx
• Crystal (Crystal-lang) : https://crystal-lang.org

Dependencies on Linux (or MingW):

• libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev
• libgtk : gtk+-3.0 (See your package manager for instructions ("apt-get" or "yum" or "pacman", or other, depending upon your linux distribution))

Dependencies on Mac

brew install gtk+3

Installation

1. Install the Isomorphic browser first (once): https://github.com/serge-hulne/isomorphic-crystal-browser
2. git clone https://github.com/serge-hulne/isomorphic-crystal-examples
3. cd isomorphic-crystal-examples
4. shards install
5. make
6. ./ex1
7. Edit : app.cr, state.cr and register.cr to create your own app.

Updates / news :

https://forum.crystal-lang.org/t/isomorphic-crystal-updates/6007

Usage

The aim is to provide a portable GUI library which will allows developers to code desktop apps in Crystal.

• One goal is to make it as easy to use as Tkinter for Python.
• Another goal is portability across platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows)
• Another goal is to make it easy to distribute : The only dependency is Webview for Crystal. The app is simply one (binary executable) file.
• The library uses Crystal, HTML, CSS and Webmin, internally but developers using the library only need to master Crystal (no HTML, CSS, JS knowledge required).
• The author expects to develop a fairly complete set of widgets, to match the most commonly used HTML tags, once the initial tests are conclusive.

GUI lib for Crystal-lang allowing for developing simple desktop apps using Crystal only. Zero dependencies.

illustrations

Layouts / Styling / Customisation

To experiment with layouts, graphical appearance, the CSS which is used is pico.css (provided in the module: pico.cr), therefore most of the features of pico.css are available in the current version of the framework.

Contributing

1. Fork it (https://github.com/your-github-user/gui_1/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Contributors

• Serge Hulne - creator and maintainer

pico.cr is based on pico.css (https://picocss.com)