❤️ Community Guest Book

[ocornut]

New experiment ~ I thought it would be nice to open a little guest book in the form of a thread, as not everyone may want to post to the gallery.

• talk about your encounter with dear imgui. how do you like it, how did it impact your programming habits, enabled your project, your team etc. ? anything you feel like sharing.
• the general intent is to try to keep this positive and not requiring an answer. if you have specific requests or need to have a discussion, best to open a dedicated issue.
• try to not post images unless they are particularly meaningful to your post: prefer to use links. so this doesn't become another gallery with apps pictures.

Thank you!

[JustaSimpleUser]

Oh, wow, this'll go well 😋.

I'm a novice C++ hobbyist and not the best poster boy for extolling the virtues of Dear ImGUI (or any UI tooling, for that matter).

I was trying to decide how to turn a pet project from console to GUI and it was daunting. The learning paths for the inexperienced solo developer for every solution were complex and learning-by-example is not everyone's cup of tea. Dear ImGUI was featured in a couple of The Cherno VT videos and I thought I should give it a go.

Here I was introduced to the learning curve I call my Brick Wall, Building a functional UI is not easy and and I'm clearly not dedicating enough time to understanding basics. I've had small victories with comprehension though I suffer from a lack of API documentation that's limiting my awareness of what functionality is available.

That said, I've enjoyed the foray into Dear ImGUI and will persevere until I'm satisfied that I have something that works. In the meantime, I'll enjoy the learning experience and, hopefully, the outcome.

[Per-Morten]

Even though I'm not deep into the inner workings of Dear ImGui or use it to create as complicated UI as I see a lot of other people do, I find that Dear ImGui has become a core tool in my day to day work.

I work a lot with file conversion software for CAD tools, and I find CAD file formats to be quite complicated. Each time we decide to support a new file format the first thing I do is to write a Dear ImGui Browser/Inspector for said file format, just so I can interactively step through a file and explore the values and connections in it. This browser not only aids in the initial learning and understanding of the CAD formats, but also becomes an invaluable tool for debugging issues in the converters later on. Dear ImGui is such a perfect fit for this. The immediate mode nature means that I can write the browser in a "tree traversal" manner (somewhat like a recursive descent parser), which is both very intuitive and malleable. The standard ImGui widgets such as buttons, text, tree nodes (which is 99% of what I use 😅) covers essentially everything I need for these browsers, and are so convenient and easy to use that I can usually write one of these browsers in 1 day with ~500-1000 lines of code.

The other place I use ImGui is in our Unity application. Here we use it for the obvious case, creating various debugging tools (value inspection, runtime profilers, etc). We also use ImGui a lot as part of prototyping new functionality. Using ImGui gives me much faster iteration times than creating UI in Unity, and also creates a clear "border" for when a given functionality is finished in the prototyping stage and should be cleaned up for production etc.

[wba6]

I have yet to delve deeply into Dear ImGui, but it has already allowed me to create some simple yet cool things (in my opinion as a student).

A few years ago, I began searching for a straightforward way to add a GUI to my C++ projects. However, I found that most of the options I came across seemed very complicated for someone who had just started programming in C++. Then, I remember finding some posts on Stack Overflow that briefly mentioned Dear ImGui, so I decided to look into the project. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to get a simple window working with my projects. I also found the documentation and community around the project to be very helpful in creating whatever I needed at the moment.

Since then, I have used ImGui for a variety of purposes, from creating an easy way to view stats about my program to making little games. Looking ahead, I am excited about the future of my projects with Dear ImGui. The flexibility and ease of use that ImGui offers have opened up so many possibilities, and I can't wait to explore them further.

[Nolram12345]

I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe that DearImGui is among the greatest software libraries ever created. It is both incredibly simple and intuitive to not just use, but integrate (frankly no other UI library even comes close), but is euqally immensely powerful, performant, well-maintained (thank you for your incredible work Omar and the rest of the contributors!), and makes creating UIs for various tools and editors an absolute breeze, which is... frankly, incredible! Things that I never before even considered writing a UI tool for I can now easily realise with DearImGui, improving productivity and happiness across the board. Frankly, the quality of library and documentation on display here is astonishing, and I am always excited to see what new releases offer. Thank you for creating DearImGui!

PS: Consider DearImGui merchandise. I'd get some.