Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces - 2005

I will also say that this is not an academic argument for me; I am in the middle of writing yet another immediate-mode GUI right now, for the game editor I am working on. Every day I am freshly glad that I am doing things as IMGUI instead of RMGUI. Here is a (somewhat old) video explaining some of the motivations behind structuring things as IMGUI: [VIDEO]

It’s a library for making windows, buttons, etc (called widgets), for windows Linux and macOS. If you’d like to make graphical applications though, I recommend immediate mode frameworks [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]

in 2016 Casey Muratori wrote a few words about his old video "IMMEDIATE-MODE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACES (2005)" -- apparently he'd been using the technique for years by then and had coined the, now commonly used, imgui acronym -- see: [LINK] and if you dive into that video at 16:50 you'll see a very elegant description of minimal state immediate mode button logic; direct time link: [VIDEO]

ImGui is engine/GPU agnostic Themeing isn't a just a retained mode thing, you can do wonders with immediate UIs, even though (dear)ImGui doesn't provide much, you can still do wonders: [LINK] The gaming cheating community is quite creative as well: [LINK] More on that topic: [VIDEO]

Casey Muratori of handmade hero fame is one of the original pioneers (potentially the first?) of immediate mode user-interfaces. Check out this lecture/demo from nearly 20 years ago: [VIDEO]

I've long been very unimpressed by common GUI development models. And also by resulting GUIs themselves - typically not very flexible. I've made a few attempts to find better approaches. But the fundamental problem is that in the end one always ends up with a separate state machine for GUI elements - so the GUI has to be synchronized with the state of the main thread. This is hard to get right, and unflexible in the end. Two days ago I came across the "Immediate Mode GUI" approach. It has some following for example in the games or realtime graphics sector. I think it's nice and very flexible, but could imagine it falls flat for complex interaction models where you just need considerable state, and it's better to use conventional widgets which have much of the logic encapsulated: [VIDEO] [LINK]

ImGui is a fantastic, and much beloved C++ library whose primary use is to create debug/level editor UIs in games, but people use it for many other purposes as well, some of them quite complex. It can plug into various renderers prety easily, and bindings exist for many popular languages, like Rust, and Rust. It was inspired by this talk given in 2005 by casey muratori on immediate mode guis: [VIDEO] Neat to see additions like this that can plug into it. The rust joke was on purpose.

As far as I can piece together, Casey Muratori first described the approach in an early YouTube video in 2005: [VIDEO] The basic approach certainly existed far earlier, though. Early "graphical" command line applications, for example, most likely all took an immediate mode approach. It's just that no one thought it was worth making the distinction until after living through the hell that is retained mode GUI programming. In a way, React (along with other vdom-based GUI frameworks) is another rediscovery of immediate mode GUI techniques, but with more of a functional (reactive) programming influence.