Installation

Prerequisites

• A recent stable Rust toolchain (edition 2021, ≥ 1.74 recommended).
• pkg-config.
• A C/C++ build toolchain: build-essential, cmake.
• libclang for bindgen (used by gpui and its transitive deps).

System Libraries

vgui does not depend on system libraries directly, but gpui does — it talks to the native window system (Wayland and X11 on Linux, Cocoa/Metal on macOS, Win32/DirectX on Windows). The following development packages are required to build gpui on a Debian/Ubuntu Linux host:

sudo apt-get install -y \
  build-essential \
  cmake \
  pkg-config \
  libclang-dev \
  libssl-dev \
  libzstd-dev \
  libfontconfig1-dev \
  libfreetype6-dev \
  libglib2.0-dev \
  libgtk-3-dev \
  libasound2-dev \
  libdbus-1-dev \
  libxkbcommon-dev \
  libxkbcommon-x11-dev \
  libx11-dev \
  libxext-dev \
  libxrandr-dev \
  libxinerama-dev \
  libxcursor-dev \
  libxi-dev \
  libwayland-dev \
  libgl-dev \
  libegl-dev

Other distributions

sudo dnf install -y \
  clang-devel openssl-devel libzstd-devel fontconfig-devel freetype-devel \
  glib2-devel gtk3-devel alsa-lib-devel dbus-devel \
  libxkbcommon-devel libxkbcommon-x11-devel \
  libX11-devel libXext-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel \
  libXcursor-devel libXi-devel wayland-devel \
  mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libEGL-devel \
  cmake pkg-config

sudo pacman -S --needed \
  base-devel clang cmake pkgconf \
  openssl zstd fontconfig freetype2 glib2 gtk3 alsa-lib dbus \
  libxkbcommon libxkbcommon-x11 \
  libx11 libxext libxrandr libxinerama libxcursor libxi wayland \
  mesa

xcode-select --install

Adding vgui to Your Project

Add vgui (and gpui) to your Cargo.toml. Both are used as git dependencies — neither crate is published to crates.io:

[dependencies]
vgui = { git = "https://github.com/vgerbot-libraries/vgui" }
gpui = { git = "https://github.com/zed-industries/zed" }
gpui-platform = { git = "https://github.com/zed-industries/zed", package = "gpui_platform" }

vgui can also be used as a path dependency if you have a local checkout.

Then bring the prelude into scope:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
use vgui::prelude::*;
}

The prelude exports view!, css!, tw!, twc!, variants!, theme!, the reactive primitives (create_signal, create_memo, create_effect, create_router, ReadSignal, WriteSignal, Router, RouteMatch), the click helper, mount, context API (Context, use_context, use_context_or, provide_context), NodeRef, input widget constructors and props types, styling types (TwClass, TwClassSource, IntoTwStyle, Theme), overlay helpers (portal, floating), and Breakpoint. It also re-exports gpui::prelude::* for convenience.

Verify the build compiles:

cargo build

The first build compiles gpui and its graphics backends, so expect a longer initial compile. Subsequent incremental builds are fast.