MyGUI is a cross-platform library for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for games and 3D applications. It is written in C++17 and is designed to be fast, flexible, and easy to integrate with various rendering engines.

Online demos | Showcase | Projects using MyGUI

Features

• Wide widget set: buttons, edit boxes, combo boxes, lists, tree controls, item boxes, tab controls, scroll bars, progress bars, windows, and more
• Multiple render backends: Vulkan, Direct3D 9, Direct3D 11, OpenGL (legacy), OpenGL 3.x, OpenGL ES 3 / WebGL 2, Ogre, OgreNext, OpenSceneGraph
• Skin system: fully customizable widget appearance via XML-based skin definitions
• Layout system: load UI layouts from XML files at runtime; includes a visual Layout Editor
• Tools: built-in editors for layouts, skins, images, and fonts
• Font rendering: TrueType fonts via FreeType, bitmap fonts, and MSDF (multi-channel signed distance field) font support
  • Five hinting modes: native, auto-hint, no-auto-hint, monochrome, and disabled
  • Dynamic kerning with per-pair spacing adjustments
  • Configurable Unicode code point ranges with inclusion and exclusion support
  • Text effects: shadow, colour, selection highlighting, cursor, word wrap, and alignment
  • MSDF shaders for OpenGL 3.x, OpenGL ES, DirectX 11, Ogre, OgreNext (GLSL, HLSL, Metal, SPIR-V)
  • Visual FontEditor tool for authoring and previewing font definitions
• Platform support: Windows, Linux, macOS; also runs in the browser via Emscripten
• High DPI support: automatic DPI scaling for font rendering; demos and tools scale automatically on high-DPI displays
  • Fonts auto-scale to the display DPI (AutoDpi, on by default); set Gui::setDpiScale() before initialise() to control the scale, or use the DpiScale property in font XML for a manual override. setDpiScale() can also be used to scale the entire GUI uniformly without touching the OS DPI. Fonts are re-rasterized at the scaled size, so they remain pixel-perfect.
  • To enable high DPI in your SDL application:
    1. On Windows, call SetProcessDpiAwarenessContext(DPI_AWARENESS_CONTEXT_PER_MONITOR_AWARE_V2) before creating the window
    2. Create the SDL window with SDL_WINDOW_ALLOW_HIGHDPI and initialize the rendering context
    3. Compute dpiScale: Windows uses SDL_GetDisplayDPI() / 96.0f; macOS uses pixel width (SDL_GetWindowSizeInPixels()) divided by window width (SDL_GetWindowSize())
    4. Call Gui::setDpiScale(dpiScale) before Gui::initialise()
    5. Divide SDL window sizes and mouse coordinates by dpiScale on Windows; keep them unchanged on macOS. Use these logical dimensions for setViewSize() and drawable pixels for the rendering viewport.
• Localization: built-in language string management
• Animation: configurable widget controllers for fades, slides, and more
• Rotation: rotate widgets and their descendants in 2D space.

Rendering Backends

Backend	CMake ID
Dummy (no-op)	1
Ogre	3
OpenGL	4
Direct3D 9	5
Direct3D 11	6
OpenGL 3.x	7
OpenGL ES 3 / WebGL 2 (Emscripten)	8
OgreNext	9
Vulkan	10
OpenSceneGraph	11

Select a backend with the -DMYGUI_RENDERSYSTEM=<id> CMake option.

Build

Requirements

• CMake ≥ 3.22
• C++17 compiler
• SDL2 for tools and demos
• FreeType (optional, enabled by default)
• glad (required on Windows for OpenGL and OpenGL 3.x backends)
• One of the render systems

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/MyGUI/mygui.git
cd mygui
cmake -S . -B build -DMYGUI_RENDERSYSTEM=7
cmake --build build

Usage in your project

After installing MyGUI, use it from your CMake project with modern targets:

find_package(MyGUI REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(myapp PRIVATE MyGUI::MyGUI MyGUI::OgrePlatform)

Available targets:

Target	Description
MyGUI::MyGUI	Core library
MyGUI::OgrePlatform	Ogre backend
MyGUI::OpenGLPlatform	OpenGL backend
MyGUI::OpenGL3Platform	OpenGL 3.x backend
MyGUI::OpenGLESPlatform	OpenGLES backend (Emscripten)
MyGUI::DirectXPlatform	Direct3D 9 backend
MyGUI::DirectX11Platform	Direct3D 11 backend
MyGUI::OgreNextPlatform	OgreNext backend
MyGUI::VulkanPlatform	Vulkan backend
MyGUI::OsgPlatform	OpenSceneGraph backend

For OgreNext, add its installation prefix to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH when configuring the consumer, or set OGRE_DIR.

Build options:

Option	Default	Description
MYGUI_RENDERSYSTEM	7 (OpenGL 3.x)	Render backend
MYGUI_USE_FREETYPE	ON	Enable FreeType font rendering
MYGUI_MSDF_FONTS	OFF	Enable MSDF font support
MYGUI_BUILD_DEMOS	ON	Build demo applications
MYGUI_BUILD_ADVANCED_DEMOS	ON	Build advanced demo applications
MYGUI_BUILD_TOOLS	ON	Build layout/skin/font/image editors
MYGUI_BUILD_UNITTESTS	ON	Build headless unit tests
MYGUI_BUILD_WRAPPER	OFF	Build C# bindings (Windows only)
MYGUI_BUILD_TEST_APP	OFF	Build test application

Tools

MyGUI ships with several visual editors under Tools/:

• LayoutEditor — WYSIWYG layout designer (produces .layout XML files)
• SkinEditor — widget skin creator
• ImageEditor — image resource editor
• FontEditor — font resource editor
• FontConverter — headless CLI tool that converts a ResourceTrueTypeFont XML into a ResourceManualFont XML + PNG atlas pair. Useful for re-baking fonts from source without launching a GUI editor.

Tests

Run tests with ctest --test-dir build -C RelWithDebInfo --output-on-failure (use your build configuration).

Run python3 Scripts/Tests/test_install.py to build, install, relocate, and run an OpenGL3 platform consumer without creating a graphics context. Add --static to test static linking or --rendersystem <ID> to select another backend. CI uses --skip-build --build-dir build to reuse its existing build; installation, relocation, and the consumer test always run.

Run python3 Scripts/Tests/compare_screenshots.py build to compare demos and tools screenshots against reference images, checking rendering consistency across platforms and render backends. Requires built applications, a graphical display, and NumPy/Pillow (python3 -m pip install numpy pillow). MacOS OpenGL and DirectX require --tolerance 1 due to rounding specifics not related to MyGUI.

Documentation

• Website: http://mygui.info/
• API docs: build with cmake --build build --target api-docs (requires Doxygen)

Code formatting

This project uses clang-format to enforce a consistent C++ code style. Before committing, run the formatting check:

Scripts/run-clang-format.py

Use --dry to not change any files and only see formatting issues:

To run the check automatically on every commit, install pre-commit:

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

The pre-commit hook is optional — it skips automatically if clang-format is not installed.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License — see COPYING.MIT for details.

Links

• Website: http://mygui.info/
• Repository: https://github.com/MyGUI/mygui
• CI: https://github.com/MyGUI/mygui/actions