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I'm confused. Are you being sarcastic? Isn't this readme in the most typical LLM-ism?

I find it to be confusing LLM spam. It spends a lot of time talking about Qt APIs, and dearimgui... most of which could go in a separate page.

But the worst part is all code snippets are followed by an image which is not related to the code snippet. It's not what you get by typing the code... it's something completely different.

Many of my old >1K star GitHub projects were not that great, but I always made sure to create the cleanest, simplest possible READMEs, inspired by things like the Python requests library's docs (https://github.com/psf/requests). I think it helped a lot in their success.

I remember someone once created a GitHub issue requesting I turn the README into some verbose technical thing with full API docs and a bunch of people replied saying they greatly preferred the "pitch + high-level examples" style.

Yes, this is definitely one of my pet peeves. Just give me input --> output, then everything in between.

Yes, this is so important and yet so often not considered. This README was pretty good, thorough and not ambiguous. The number of projects that assume you know what their obscure idea relates to is huge, mainly as the authors can't put themselves in the shoes of their audience.

It still sounds like LLM which is nauseating to read. For instance: "Blender's interface is famous for how it feels. You press a number field and drag: the cursor vanishes, the value glides under your hand, and you never hit the edge of the screen. " that's ChatGPT writing.

Not to mention that it includes screengrabs! Which a shocking amount of gui and web projects dont do

I can't figure out if you're being sarcastic

If you're working on a small game project without an existing framework/platform, you usually build a really bargain-basement game editor alongside it. That editor takes a long time, and it's often spent in arranging UI stuff.

If you're already using Blender to make assets, there's some benefit to stuffing Blender's UI into your game editor too.

Why not? For similar applications it would be really beneficial to not have to reimplement all the little UI interactions they've polished over the years

No? I think there would easily be other use cases where Blenders UI would be very suitable, e.g. Audio software.

It is not a UI paradigm that you would use for just anything, but for certain poweruser software it is one of the best paradigms I have seen, especially since they managed to get rid of 90% of the rough corners in the past decade of development.

Egui also has terrible defaults: https://github.com/emilk/egui

But a good design system does the trick. Artcraft apps use this library and their Adobe clones come very close to the original apps.

Yeah but, this can’t possibly be any worse than tkinter.

Q: “Whats wrong with tkinter?!?!”

A: It sucks, that’s what!

Imagine this spinning off and becoming this generation's GTK.

Typical HN top comment negativity :)

That UI is fine to be on many more places than Blender, given that many libraries people use are way worse. Imgui for one example.

How about a simpler UI consisting of just a text input field for AI.

Do you think it's with trying to revive Blender Game Engine? Edit: just learned there's a fork https://upbge.org/

I still think Softimage|XSI was the best UI/UX that ever existed. Moving to Blender from it was... painful.

Hi, the creator of BUI here.

I do hate vibe coding. So I took a different approach for BUI.

Instead of asking the agent to decouple the UI, I asked it to remove all the parts which isn't a part of UI logic.

Turns out AI is pretty good at removing than generating.

Really? From what I've heard, Iced, Slint, Dioxus Native, Freya, etc are all slower.

It really annoys me the rust library is named “GPUI”. That’s the name of this method that’s been used for eternity by games.

It’d be like naming my http library HTTP.

And it’s why Dear IMGUI isn’t just named “IMGUI”.

This matches my findings. Asides from some performance footgun, it all strikes me as a single purpose, low level thing with a DX only an LLM could love. I suppose many today don't need more than that but I found the other Rust GUI solutions to be maturing rapidly with better stories across the board.

The main thing GPUI has going for it is mind share and that's a great thing to have. The mind share is unfortunately highly fragmented though as the original authors are not interested in selling a GUI library. Hopefully the community efforts will come together to produce a more polished and general library. A well used library is better than a better designed one maintained by a single person.

A side by side screenshot of inkscape/gimp/blender for those who don't have them installed

https://cleanshot.com/share/WW9yFdMy

It's just pointless to port GIMP over at this stage, you may as well do a greenfield project without the cultural baggage and poor foundations.

I just want to be able to crop and draw on top of images. Like old Paint. That is literally all I want to ever do with images. What should I use in Linux for this purpose

Inkscape’s UI is much, much better than Blender’s, IMO.

Fantastic is the last word I would use the describe blenders UI/UX.

and then rename it blimp

De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum.

Hi, we currently don't have a macOS build yet, we're planning to do both native and GUI both !!

Hi, the creator here.

It's time to do it! Also we have a discord, if you end up reviving it, do share it over here:

https://discord.gg/MWXZfdyM3D

I was just a kid in 2002, so couldn’t contribute, but I remember checking the MoneyMeter going up every day, so that the community could buy out Blender and make it free software. GPL does restrict it, but it’s also only the only reason Blender is not a long forgotten piece of software from the 90s.

Well.. Old discussion but I actually think it's the better way (sorry. MIT, you are more free then anything). Either contribute back or stay away from open source work that others did for you.

Is it bui's author decision or a consequence of Blender itself being GPL?

in what way?

Three things one must never ask: a woman her weight, a man his salary, and an HN commenter what “use case” the GPL ruined for them.

After further exploration, it does work, but not without fiddling around with the tkinter code that exists. Not bad results; better than the original Tkinter rendering, anyway, unless you like that retro look.

Yes, it defaults to CPU and explains when you might want to use the GPU and why in this section https://github.com/ppmpreetham/BUI#18-rendering-on-the-cpu-a...

Why should kitty use Blender UI? It's just a terminal emulator with no GUI elements and is already GPU accelerated.

Well, given that so many folks always argue they are Linux distros even though it is an implementation detail for userspace APIs, ChromeOS, WebOS and Android.

I'm interested to learn more, do you have link?

Hi, the creator here.

It works perfectly on my machine, and another friend's machine. Just to be sure, which demo did you try? the website or python or rust?

What makes you say that? It was the part that goes...

> The repository is built entirely using LLMs, with no human-written code. The drawing and interaction code is ported from Blender's sources, and the behavior is checked by tests: C, Python, Rust and JavaScript suites, the tkinter side-by-side programs and the GPU parity test.

...wasn't it?

so, why gpui not taking Claude?

Yess, never stop building!

We also have a kotlin binding support coming soon, btw!

That was my first thought as well. It would have been reassuring to at least see it on the roadmap.

It'll be added soon!

and thats fine. without LLMs no human would have invested so much required time and effort to do this! and now such awesome things are possible with a bit of tokens and a small prompt. overall a win

The source code is in C/C++, there's no need to port it to rust

Super curious about the limitations you see in GPUI! I built a custom rust UI framework for the software i am developing but i always kept an eye on GPUI, what is limiting about it in your opinion?

I never found them terrible, but I guess I spent a long time staring at them so maybe I just got used to them.

Do Maya and others have better UIs? Honestly, I find them more repulsive than Blender's

More like a “why not both” situation, imho. I have apps I could port to use this immediately.

Is this even a thing anymore? The only app I can think of that matches the system theme is GIMP… not exactly a paragon of design

Missed this - this is a deal breaker for many (most?) potential applications. GPL is fine for applications like Blender, but is limiting for libs.

GPL is the best opensource license. But seeing this as a library, it might need to be LGPL rather than pure GPL (ala, you can use it as a library without "tainting" your source, but if you make modifications to the library, you must release it).

Lol, I'll showcase that project in the website if someone actually does that

Most native widget toolkits don't actually support rendering into 3d canvasses very well, nor very compact UI layouts. I generally prefer native widgets, but for a dense prosumer application, they aren't always the correct choice (and you'll see even Apple stray from their native UI widgets for, say, Logic Pro)

None of the apps on my computer have any sort of cohesion with each other. It might just be me but I think this idea is dead, on Windows and Linux at least.

I target all platforms, and so does most other desktop software today.

Ok for linux it's GTK and Qt. What's native for windows in 2026? It's a complete joke of system UI.

I am pretty sure HN is an enclave of the only remaining people in the world who think this way. A sanctuary preserving the last specimens of an endangered species.