Unison

A unified graphical user experience toolkit for Go desktop applications. macOS, Windows, and Linux are supported.

Required setup

Unison is built upon glfw. As such, it requires some setup prior to being able to build correctly:

• On macOS, you need Xcode or Command Line Tools for Xcode (xcode-select --install) for required headers and libraries.
• On Ubuntu/Debian-like Linux distributions, you need libgl1-mesa-dev and xorg-dev packages.
• On CentOS/Fedora-like Linux distributions, you need libX11-devel libXcursor-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel mesa-libGL-devel libXi-devel libXxf86vm-devel packages.
• On Windows, you need tdm-gcc as well as git-scm for its bash shell.
• See compilation dependencies for full details.

This version of Unison was built using Go 1.22. It has been compiled under many earlier versions of Go in the past, but only Go 1.22+ will be considered as I make further changes.

Example

An example application can be found in the example directory:

go run example/main.go

Notes

Unison was developed with the needs of my personal projects in mind, so may not be a good fit for your particular needs. I'm open to suggestions on ways to improve the code and will happily consider Pull Requests with bug fixes or feature additions.

Compatibility

Unison is very much a work in progress. As such, it is likely to have breaking changes. To reflect this, a version number of 0.x.x will be in use until such time that I'm comfortable locking things down to ensure compatibility between releases. Please keep this in mind when making the decision to use Unison in your own code.

Look & Feel

Unison defines its own look and feel for widgets and will likely be adjusted over time. This was done to provide as much consistency as possible between all supported platforms. It also side-steps issues where a given platform itself has no or poorly defined standards. Colors, fonts, spacing, how the widgets behave, and more are customizable, so if you are feeling particularly ambitious, you could create your own theming that matches a given platform.

Organization

There are a large number of Go source files in a single, top-level package. Unison didn't start out this way, but user experience code tends to need to have its tentacles in many places, and the logical separations I made kept hindering the ability to do things. Ultimately, I made the decision to collapse nearly everything into a single package to simplify development and greatly reduce the overall complexity of things.