imgui-guide

Immediate-Mode GUI Guidelines

Architecture for an immediate-mode GUI: the UI is re-issued every frame from application data, controls are identified by id rather than retained objects, and the few things that must persist (hover, focus, drag, DPI) live in a small, deliberate state store. For how the resulting vertex/index data reaches the GPU, see gpu-rendering-guide.

Requirements

• The UI is rebuilt every frame; widgets return their result inline (if (button(id, ...))), they are not retained objects.
• A small per-frame and cross-frame state store holds only what immediate mode cannot recompute: hover, active, focus, drag, layout.

Essentials

• One draw call - Pack all widgets into compact primitive buffers and synthesize vertices in the shader; encode clip and texture so no state switches are needed, see references/draw-batching.md
• Stable unique IDs - Key hover, active, focus, drag, and tab order by per-control id — the substitute for retained widget objects, see references/ids-and-state.md
• Frame delay resolves ordering - Immediate mode can't see later controls; defer hover/focus decisions one frame so the last-drawn control wins, see references/frame-delay.md
• Process events in end_*(), consume by clearing - Trickle keyboard events through a responder chain; one event per frame, see references/events-and-focus.md
• Drag-and-drop is a data operation - Hold a single global drag id; the drop is a data-model mutation, not UI plumbing, see references/drag-and-drop.md
• Own DPI - Work in virtual coordinates, scale at the edges (vertex shader, rect conversion), key the font atlas by DPI, see references/dpi-scaling.md

Localization & Accessibility

• Hash the source string as the key - Wrap visible text in LOCALIZE(...), resolve per frame through a swappable localizer that falls back to the source string, and audit coverage with a pseudo-localization mode, see references/localization.md
• Build a side semantic tree while drawing - As each control is drawn, register its role/label/rect/state into a per-frame list, then expose that list to platform accessibility APIs and automation — immediate mode does not preclude a screen-reader-visible tree, see references/accessibility.md

Gotchas

• Immediate mode cannot know whether a control drawn later this frame will occlude the current one — resolve hover with a one-frame delay (compute next_hover, promote at frame end) so the topmost/last-drawn control wins.
• An input event can create a new control mid-frame that then reacts to the very event that created it; a one-frame delay is sometimes the only clean fix.
• Two controls sharing an id silently merge their hover/active/focus state — derive ids from a stable source (data object id, loop index folded into a scope), never from screen position.
• SetProcessDpiAwareness(PROCESS_PER_MONITOR_DPI_AWARE) must run before any window is created, and DPI must be part of the font-atlas cache key or text renders blurry.
• Drop targets must consume the mouse-release before the end-of-frame step that cancels a drag, or valid drops are lost.
• Hashing the source string as a localization key means editing the English copy silently orphans the existing translation — treat string edits as re-translation work, and run pseudo-localization to catch unmarked strings.
• A control drawn but not registered into the accessibility list is invisible to assistive tech; one registered but not drawn is a ghost — build the side list in lockstep with drawing, and actually feed it to the platform accessibility API.

Example

// A button: stateless to issue, identified by a stable id; state lives in the ui context.
bool button(tm_ui_o *ui, uint64_t id, rect_t r, const char *label) {
    if (rect_contains(r, ui->mouse))
        ui->next_hover = id;                 // resolved at frame end (last-drawn wins)
    const bool clicked = ui->hover == id && ui->left_mouse_released;
    draw_rect(ui->buffer, r, ui->hover == id ? COLOR_HOT : COLOR_NORMAL); // into shared primitive buffer
    draw_text(ui->buffer, r, label);
    return clicked;
}

Progressive Disclosure

• Read references/draw-batching.md - Load when designing how UI geometry is buffered and submitted: primitive buffers, index encoding, single draw call
• Read references/ids-and-state.md - Load when deciding what state persists across frames and how controls are identified
• Read references/frame-delay.md - Load when fixing hover/focus/occlusion ordering bugs that immediate mode can't resolve within one frame
• Read references/events-and-focus.md - Load when adding keyboard focus, responder chains, tab order, or event trickling/consumption
• Read references/drag-and-drop.md - Load when implementing drag-and-drop, especially across windows
• Read references/dpi-scaling.md - Load when handling high-DPI / per-monitor scaling, font atlases, or virtual-vs-pixel coordinates
• Read references/localization.md - Load when localizing UI strings: extraction, source-string-as-key hashing, swappable localizer, pseudo-localization
• Read references/accessibility.md - Load when adding screen-reader support, exposing UI semantics, automation, zoom, or high-contrast themes to an immediate-mode UI