Blender's UI, ripped out of Blender and rebuilt as a standalone library
Blender's UI and Runtime: Much Faster Than GPUI
BUI decouples Blender's famously fast, battery-friendly interface from its codebase and ships it as a small C runtime with bindings for Python, Rust, JavaScript/React, C, C++ and Dear ImGui. You get Blender's drag-to-edit number fields, fuzzy menu search, pie menus, 45 native widgets and both themes in any app — no Blender install, browser or webview required. The author claims 2–4× less CPU per frame than gpui-fast, with less RAM and a ~5 ms first frame.
Blender's interface is famous for how it feels. You press a number field and drag: the cursor vanishes, the value glides under your hand, and you never hit the edge of the screen.
- munksbeer
Can I please congratulate you on your README. It rapidly tells me what I'm looking at, and why I might be interested in the project. There are so many READMEs around that ... just don't do that. They ramble about technical implementation details, how their language choice is amazing, and a third of the way through the README, I'm still left wondering, "but what does this project do?".
- lukebitts
That's really cool! I burned some tokens trying to develop something similar but gave up halfway. A lot of people criticize Blender's UI but as someone who has been using blender for more than a decade now I just find it so elegant. Just the customizability itself is something I miss on most 3D software, if not all of them. Being able to just split screens and change their functionality, paired with the tabs for different workflows, it is a really good solution for a very complex software. I'd like to see a game engine with this much UI freedom.
- dev0p
I love the general idea behind Blender's UI.
And I do appreciate the effort that goes into it, especially in the latest versions as it got much better,
But I really really really REALLY don't want that UI in anything else other than Blender.
Please don't.
- nicoburns
For anyone looking at Rust GUI: don't expect GPUI to be the fastest. From what I've heard, Iced, Slint, Dioxus Native, Freya, etc are all faster. Despite claims of being blazingly fast, GPUI isn't that optimized. Zed gets away with it because it's UI is simple.
- pjankiewicz
I don’t buy arguments like much faster than X. Take X let claude work on it for 2 days and it will be fast. In case of gpui I took the community version as a part of my project and it is quite fast because it is optimized for my app.
- felixthehat
It would be such a boon if GIMP and Inkscape could adopt blender's fantastic GUI
- mariocesar
I have the same idea 10 years ago. :D I am so happy seeing that somebody was capable of making it. I always admire blenders UI and all the work developers did on making it.
- cultofmetatron
Ive been thinking this would be amazing to do for ages. happy someone finally did it. its the perfect system for interfaces where speed matters. hope to see more 3d modellers, video editors, daws and simulation systems built on this.