Dear ImGui is a great library but it may not be easy to get a simple "hello, world". Indeed, Dear ImGui doesn't handle the display, keyboard and mouse by itself. A backend is required to do this:
You will need a backend to integrate Dear ImGui in your app. The backend passes mouse/keyboard/gamepad inputs and variety of settings to Dear ImGui, and is in charge of rendering the resulting vertices.
A backend is something like SDL or OpenGL, stuffs that I am absolutely not familiar with, so it took me a while just to display a simple text.
Here is an "hello, world" project so you can get started easily!
The project builds with CMake.
From the command line:
git clone https://github.com/Bktero/HelloWorldWithDearImGui
cmake HelloWorldWithDearImGui\ -B build -G Ninja
cmake --build build
./build/HelloWorldWithDearImGui.exeIt will clone this repository, generate build files for Ninja with GCC, build the project and run the application. Of course, you can select the generator and compiler you want. I have successfully built the project on Windows 10 with mingw64/GCC 9.2 (with both Make and Ninja) and MSVC 2019.
The project uses the OpenGL + GLFW backend.
The FetchContent module is used in CMakelists.txt to download the dependencies from GitHub:
- Dear ImGui, obviously.
- GLFW, used for the backend.
- GLEW, also used for the backend.
Note that the official GitHub for GLEW is https://github.com/nigels-com/glew but it doesn't build properly with CMake. This issue suggests to use an alternative repository: https://github.com/Perlmint/glew-cmake.
Dear ImGui requires C++11. In C++98, GCC emits warnings:
warning: anonymous variadic macros were introduced in C++11 [-Wvariadic-macros]