go-widgets

One widget tree, painted by Go, on every surface Go reaches. A native window on X11, Wayland, macOS and Windows; a <canvas> in a browser tab; a terminal; an Android APK. No C toolchain, no webview, no system widget set: every module builds with CGO_ENABLED=0, and every pixel is drawn by the toolkit.

w, err := window.Open(window.Config{Title: "Hello"})
if err != nil {
	return err
}
defer w.Close()

box := toolkit.NewVBox()
box.Append(toolkit.NewLabel("Hello from go-widgets"))
box.Append(toolkit.NewButton("Click me", func() { /* ... */ }))
return w.Run(box) // an X11 or Wayland window, an NSWindow, a Win32 window

That is cmd/windowdemo, shortened. The same box drawn in a browser, a terminal or a PNG is the same code with a different surface underneath it.

Why one toolkit draws everything

A widget that calls the platform’s own button is as portable as the least capable platform it targets, and looks different on each. go-widgets goes the other way: a widget’s Draw only ever talks to a painter.Painter, a handful of primitives (fill a rectangle, stroke one, set a pixel, draw text). Whether those calls become RGBA pixels or terminal cells is the back-end’s business, not the widget’s.

What that costs is said plainly: no native look by default, and no free accessibility — the toolkit publishes its own accessibility tree to each platform. What it buys is one widget set, tested once, with the same behaviour everywhere, and a binary that cross-compiles from any machine to any of them.

Where to go next

Licence

BSD-3-Clause.