Make Beautiful Desktop Applications in C++

So about a year and a half ago, I made a couple of videos talking about the best way to make desktop applications in C++.

There's this one, this is the OG, basically talking about how I think I'm GUI is a really good choice for a lot of people.

But then I kind of took it a little bit further and I made my own kind of application framework called Walnut.

I wanted a nice, clean kind of, but lightweight platform that you could use to make UI apps for desktop in C++.

And I think really this stemmed from us needing to have a launcher so that we could like distribute games with Hazel and have a launcher that like lets you pick your graphics settings and all of that and hit play.

I kind of wanted it to look nice almost like Hazel's UI but I definitely didn't want it to use Hazel.

I didn't want launcher to have Hazel as a dependency because that's just crazy. Imagine having a 3D game engine powering your little launcher.

I'm sure some people have done that. So yeah that's Walnut and it's just available on github for free.

Aside from UI stuff I also wanted to kind of you know just build it into just a nice useful C++ application framework with just like a useful library.

And it's all based on hardware rendering. It uses Vulkan to render all of the graphics, which makes it super graphicsy compatible.

So if you're building an application that needs to render graphics on the GPU, then it's kind of a perfect fit.

But again, even if you're not, it still works. It doesn't quite have the same compatibility as just a native application that wouldn't require, you know, like a Vulkan graphics driver.

But for most people on decent systems, it works fine. I think Hazel's

UI is probably a good indication of my goals for walnut like i'd essentially

want to be able to make an app like hazel's editor in

it more recently i made an app using walnut called walnut chat

it's like an instant messaging kind of chat application using walnut

networking a networking module for walnut there's actually a

big video all about that i'll leave it linked up there networking in c plus plus

anyway basically my point is i've been kind of on a roll with walnut

i've been really enjoying working on it and just extending it adding features that people have been requesting kind of taking a lot of the code from hazel and effectively i guess

open sourcing it in the form of walnut and not just UI

stuff like for example Hazel's serialization library

was put into walnut so that we could make that walnut

chat kind of application work but one of the most requested

features since the very beginning of walnut because that's

kind of how I showed it being used even though it wasn't officially released yet

was custom title bars so being able to make

that launcher that I showed you how does one make a custom title bar lots of people seem to think that again that's a limitation of iam GUI, thus maybe you should use like a real GUI library or whatever.

Now if you don't know exactly what a custom title bar is, usually native Windows applications look like this.

You have this kind of like you know title bar, you have like the minimize, maximize, close buttons over there.

That's kind of the native look and feel of applications on this operating system, which by the way in my examples is Windows 11.

But lots of applications like to take matters into their own hands. Like Visual Studio for example looks like this.

Unreal Engine also has this kind of custom look and it just looks really sleek, it just looks really modern. Is there any functional difference really?

Well actually yeah there might be because you can position more kind of controls in your actual title bar if you need to.

Microsoft Office for example has that whole kind of ribbon system and the save icon and stuff is up there.

There's an article even talking about how you can achieve stuff like that because it can be quite useful. So can you get that done with I Am GUI?

Of course! The thing with I Am GUI that I still, like this is why I just get like I feel something every time someone says that, oh you can't do that with I Am GUI, or oh I didn't think that was an I Am GUI application.

Like what do you not understand about the fact, I'm just getting angry here, your window is literally a canvas.

Like with something like I Am GUI, you can control every single pixel that gets rendered within that kind of client area.

And since at the end of the day we use a library like GLFW to actually make the window using like the Win32 API, we can for example expand the client area over the title bar.

We could also not decorate the window but I prefer to leave my windows decorated but we'll talk about that later. The point is of course it's possible. Is it easy?

Well yes and no. I feel like some things might be easier than you think but then there's all these edge cases that kind of are annoying.

But yeah obviously it's possible. We've had a custom title bar in Hazel for like years now. This was actually first introduced by Jay.

Jay is like our volunteer audio person who wrote the entire audio engine for Hazel.

He also really likes UI so he took the time to actually make this beautiful design that Hazel uses.

But anyway, long story short, Walnut now also has this custom title bar.

I've taken it from Hazel, I've kind of made it more generic, changed it a little bit so that it's a little bit more kind of native.

We'll talk about the details later in this video. It's really as simple as just setting custom title bar to true and that's it.

So in this video, I'm going to show you how you can make an application using walnut that uses this custom title bar.

And then I'll also go through some of the code of how it actually works and what it takes to make a custom title bar using iMGUI on Windows.

And if you want to just download and play with an application that actually uses this custom title bar and just walnut in