Installation

日本語

Prerequisites

Crystal and Shards are required. UIng is continuously tested with the latest Crystal release.

Add UIng to your application's shard.yml:

dependencies:
  uing:
    github: kojix2/uing

Install the dependencies:

shards install

The post-install script downloads the appropriate libui-ng library from kojix2/libui-ng releases. UIng uses patched libui-ng builds maintained for the supported platforms; details of those patches are available on the libui-ng dev branch.

Platform notes

Linux

Install the GTK 3 development package before building your application. The package name depends on the distribution; on Debian and Ubuntu it is libgtk-3-dev.

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev

The target Linux system also needs the GTK 3 runtime.

macOS

The system AppKit framework provides the native GUI dependencies. Both Intel and Apple Silicon are supported.

Windows

UIng supports MSVC, MinGW64, and UCRT64. Use the same toolchain as Crystal. Run MSVC builds from a developer shell such as Developer PowerShell, and use the matching MSYS2 shell for MinGW64 or UCRT64.

The post-install script downloads both /MD and /MT MSVC libraries. Normal Crystal builds use /MD; builds made with --static use /MT.

Hide the console window

GUI executables built on Windows may open a console window. Select the Windows GUI subsystem when building the final executable.

MinGW64 or UCRT64:

crystal build app.cr --link-flags "-mwindows"

MSVC:

crystal build app.cr --link-flags=/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS

Verify the installation

Create hello.cr:

require "uing"

UIng.init

window = UIng::Window.new("Hello World", 300, 200)
window.on_closing do
  UIng.quit
  true
end

window.child = UIng::Label.new("Hello from UIng")
window.show

UIng.main
UIng.uninit

Then run it:

crystal run hello.cr

If a native window titled "Hello World" opens, the installation works. Continue with First Steps to add a button and handle events.