UI Toolbox (C++)

Shared, backend-agnostic UI components for the embedded-pro C++ toolboxes — extracted from the Qt simulator/tool trees of e-foc, numerical-toolbox-cpp, robotics-toolbox-cpp and neural-network-toobox-cpp, which had drifted into byte-identical copies of the same widgets with no shared theme.

What this is

A small rendering and control abstraction plus the widgets built on it. The portable half knows nothing about Qt: it draws through a Canvas interface of ~15 primitives and reports input through plain structs. Qt is the first backend; a second toolkit can be added without touching a widget.

ui/core      geometry, colour, font, Canvas, input, PaintedView, Callback   — no Qt
ui/theme     colour/font roles, chart metrics, Light + Instrument themes    — no Qt
ui/charts    ChartCore, AxisTransform (linear + log10), interaction         — no Qt
ui/scope     ScopeCore, RingBuffer, edge triggering                         — no Qt
ui/scene     Vector3, rigid transforms, clipping, orbit camera, grid, triad — no Qt
ui/stage     3D stage: scene graph, joints, meshes, STL, materials, view   — no Qt
ui/backend/recording  records draw calls — the test harness                 — no Qt

ui/backend/qt         QtCanvas, QtPaintedWidget, QtTheme — Qt6 Widgets

Still to come: ui/model (FormSpec, TableModel), ui/sim, ui/shell (AppShell, FormView, TableView) and ui/backend/svg.

Everything but ui/backend/qt builds and is unit-tested on Linux, macOS and Windows with no Qt installed. That is the point of the split, and it is enforced in CI rather than by convention.

Build

cmake --preset host
cmake --build --preset host-Debug
ctest --preset host

To build the Qt backend as well — QtCanvas, QtPaintedWidget, QtTheme and their tests — use the host-qt preset, which needs qt6-base-dev and libgl1-mesa-dev:

cmake --preset host-qt
cmake --build --preset host-qt-Debug
ctest --preset host-qt

UI_BUILD_QT_BACKEND is opt-in and off by default, and is deliberately not inferred from a consumer's *_BUILD_SIMULATOR flag — e-foc configures its host tools (and therefore Qt) on every host build, while the toolboxes only do so under their simulator option.

The 3D stage (robot arms, CNC machines) is described in doc/scene3d.md; a Qt demo builds with -DUI_BUILD_QT_BACKEND=ON -DUI_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON.

Contributing

Read AGENTS.md first. The portability tiers and the four enforced invariants are not advisory — the guardrails CI job fails the build on violation.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.