#Magnolia

Magnolia is a new UI toolkit written entirely from scratch in Zig for Linux desktops. It has a focus on ease-of-use, performance, and supporting older devices.

The only runtime system dependencies are X11 and OpenGL 3.0 ES.

The only additional build dependencies are Git, Zig, Zigmod.

Note: this project is a WIP and still in a very experimental state. Stay tuned for more updates.

As far as problem space you can consider this project as an alternative to a mix of GTK/KDE/QT and GNOME/Plasma depending on which part of the code you're using.

#License

Source-Available, All rights reserved. (c) 2023 Meghan Denny

Will likely be MPL-2.0 in the future.

#Credits

• Zig 0.11.0
• See zigmod.yml and zigmod.lock

#Building

Magnolia is built using the Zig build system. To see all available build options run zig build --help.

If building on NixOS, there is a shell.nix which will enable all the system dependencies needed.

Pull in the Zig dependencies by running zigmod ci.

#Options

• -Dtarget=[string] The CPU architecture, OS, and ABI to build for
• -Dcpu=[string] Target CPU features to add or subtract
• -Drelease-safe=[bool] Optimizations on and safety on
• -Drelease-fast=[bool] Optimizations on and safety off
• -Drelease-small=[bool] Size optimizations on and safety off
• -Dall=[bool] Build all apps, default only selected steps
• -Drun=[bool] Run the app too
• -Dstrip=[bool] Strip debug symbols
• -Dtest=[bool] Run for a single frame and compare output against known good result
• -Dno_demos=[bool] Do not build the demo programs.

#Available Steps

• demo-empty
• demo-part6
• demo-panelhoriz
• demo-panelvert
• demo-panelhoriz-gap
• demo-panelvert-gap
• demo-panelhoriz-fillh
• demo-panelvert-fillw
• demo-panelhoriz-fillw
• demo-panelvert-fillh
• demo-ttf-proggy
• demo-bdf-cozette
• demo-focusblur
• demo-mouse
• demo-7guis-counter
• demo-border
• demo-menubar

Terminal Applications

• fc-conflist
• fc-list

Full Applications

• Calculator
• ImageViewer

Full Application Roadmap

(in a rough order of importance) (non-exhaustive)

• TextViewer
• ManPages
• AudioViewer
• Files
• Music
• KernelLogs
• "system utilities" (see category in notes/potential apps.txt)
• UnicodeExplorer
• UnicodeInspector
• FontExplorer
• VideoViewer
• Calendar
• Dconf
• Weather
• Stocks
• Wiki
• RSS
• Email

#Inspiration / Resources

• My years of Web and UI experience
• A desire to use high quaility native apps, even on resource constrained hardware.
• A desire to bring no-nonsense native experiences to Linux.
• The ease with which the community has reached for sudo/doas in the past is a total failure in tooling.
• https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future
• https://www.cmyr.net/blog/gui-framework-ingredients.html
• https://nakst.gitlab.io/tutorial/ui-part-1.html
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/images/img00294.gif
• https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering-on-the-gpu-c3f4d782c5ac
• https://www.forkingpaths.dev/posts/22-11-01/vector_graphics.html
• https://hasen.substack.com/p/imgui-text
• https://handmade.network/forums/articles/t/7330-implementing_a_font_reader_and_rasterizer_from_scratch%2C_part_1__ttf_font_reader
• https://handmade.network/forums/wip/t/7610-reading_ttf_files_and_rasterizing_them_using_a_handmade_approach%2C_part_2__rasterization
• https://isthisarabic.com/
• https://increment.com/programming-languages/unplain-text-primer-on-non-latin/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font#Unicode_Last_Resort_font
• https://github.com/notofonts
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5557933/disable-resize-of-an-x11-window
• https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
• https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_00.html
• https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/
• https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/triangle-rasterization-in-practice/
• https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/optimizing-the-basic-rasterizer/
• https://developer.android.com/training/app-links/deep-linking
• https://developer.apple.com/ios/universal-links/
• https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/
• https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/
• https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/
• https://axleos.com/writing-a-truetype-font-renderer/
• https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/
• https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/
• https://daverupert.com/2024/02/ui-states/

#Monorepo

If your Git client is v2.26 or greater and you'd only like to build a selection of apps, you can take advantage of a sparse checkout to save on network and disk usage. For example:

git clone --no-checkout https://git.sr.ht/~nektro/magnolia-desktop
cd magnolia-desktop
git sparse-checkout init --cone
git checkout master
git sparse-checkout add src/
git sparse-checkout add apps/Calculator/
zig build Calculator