package bogue

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package bogue
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Module BogueSource

General purpose GUI (Graphical user interface) library for Ocaml.

Bogue is a lightweight and fast GUI for developing desktop applications, games, or for easy debugging of non-GUI programs.

Bogue is entirely written in ocaml except for the hardware accelerated graphics library SDL2.

  • version 20240928
  • author Vu Ngoc San

This documentation is best viewed on this page. (While on ocaml.org some links may be broken.)

Quick start

For a quick start, see Bogue's general principles, the minimal example, and the tutorials. (Again, if the links don't work, make sure you are viewing this page from here.)

The main modules are

  • Main (creating, running, and quitting your app),
  • Layout (arranging widgets to form sophisticated interfaces like table, menus, etc.) and
  • Widget (the building blocks, like labels, buttons, etc.).

indexlist

List of Modules

The only thing that open Bogue does is to bring these modules into your namespace. They have quite common names, so beware of conflict. In case of doubt, don't open Bogue, and access the modules by using the Bogue prefix, for instance Bogue.Widget.label. The Widget and Layout modules are probably the ones that you will find yourself using the most, so it's a good idea to alias them:

module W = Bogue.Widget
module L = Bogue.Layout


Sourcemodule Theme : sig ... end

Theme variables.

Sourcemodule Utils : sig ... end

Utilities.

Sourcemodule Time : sig ... end

Time in msec.

Sourcemodule Var : sig ... end

Global variables with mutex.

Sourcemodule Timeout : sig ... end

Delayed actions.

Sourcemodule Trigger : sig ... end

Dealing with events.

Sourcemodule Mixer : sig ... end

Basic audio mixer for sound effects.

Sourcemodule Sync : sig ... end

Synchronized execution queue.

Sourcemodule Draw : sig ... end

Low-level graphics and colors.

Sourcemodule Mouse : sig ... end

Mouse and touchscreen information.

Sourcemodule Tvar : sig ... end

Transform variables

Sourcemodule Avar : sig ... end

Animated variables.

Sourcemodule Selection : sig ... end

Unions of ranges of integers

Widgets

Widgets are building blocks of the GUI. They also receive all events (mouse focus, etc.) and contain the intelligence of your GUI, through connections (or callbacks, see Widget.connection). However, in order to be displayed, they need to be packed into layouts (Layout.t).

The main module for dealing with widgets is Widget.

Sourcemodule Image : sig ... end

Image widget.

Sourcemodule Style : sig ... end

Line and box styles.

Sourcemodule Label : sig ... end

One-line text widget.

Sourcemodule Button : sig ... end

Button widget with text or icon.

Sourcemodule Slider : sig ... end

Slider widget.

Sourcemodule Check : sig ... end

Checkbox widget.

Sourcemodule Text_display : sig ... end

Multi-line text display widget.

Sourcemodule Text_input : sig ... end

One-line text-input widget.

Sourcemodule Box : sig ... end

Box widget.

Sourcemodule Sdl_area : sig ... end

SDL Area widget.

Sourcemodule Widget : sig ... end

Creating widgets and giving life to them

Sourcemodule Update : sig ... end

Updating widgets

Layouts

Layouts are rectangular graphical placeholders, in which you should pack all your widgets in order to display your GUI. Sophisticated gadgets are usually obtained by combining several layouts together.

Sourcemodule Layout : sig ... end

The main, all-purpose graphics container.

Sourcemodule Space : sig ... end

Adjust various spacing and sizes of layouts.

Sourcemodule Print : sig ... end

Convert Bogue objects to strings for debugging.

Sourcemodule Snapshot : sig ... end

Create an image from a Layout.

Sourcemodule Long_list : sig ... end

Handle large lists by not displaying all elements at once.

Sourcemodule Tabs : sig ... end

Switch between layouts using Tabs.

Sourcemodule Popup : sig ... end

Put layouts on top of others.

Sourcemodule Menu : sig ... end

Various types of menus.

Sourcemodule Select : sig ... end

Drop-down select list.

Sourcemodule Radiolist : sig ... end

Check list with a single choice.

Sourcemodule Table : sig ... end

Tables with sortable columns and selectable rows.

Sourcemodule Window : sig ... end

The Bogue mainloop

Because a GUI continuously waits for user interaction, everything has to run inside a loop. You start the loop with run, and this is usually the last command of your Bogue code.

Sourcemodule Main : sig ... end

Control the workflow of the GUI mainloop.

Sourcemodule Bogue = Main

Alias for Main

Example

Here is a minimal example with a label and a check box.

open Bogue
module W = Widget
module L = Layout

let main () =

  let b = W.check_box () in
  let l = W.label "Hello world" in
  let layout = L.flat_of_w [b;l] in

  let board = Bogue.of_layout layout in
  Bogue.run board;;

let () = main ();
  Bogue.quit ()

This can be compiled to bytecode with

ocamlfind ocamlc -package bogue -linkpkg -o minimal -thread minimal.ml

and to native code with

ocamlfind ocamlopt -package bogue -linkpkg -o minimal -thread minimal.ml

Then execute the compiled code:

./minimal

A window should open which should look like this:

You may also evaluate this code in a Toplevel! (for instance utop, or in an emacs session...). Just insert

#thread;;
#require "bogue";;

at the top, then paste the example code above, and add ;; at the end.