Note: You can find a more complete version of this document in the official documentation site for Dear ImGui Bundle.

Click the bird for
the interactive manual!

Dear ImGui Bundle: an extensive set of ready-to-use widgets and libraries, based on ImGui. Start your first app in 5 lines of code, or less.

Whether you prefer Python or C++, this pack has you covered, with the same ease in both languages.

Key Features

• Easy to use, yet very powerful: Start your first app in 3 lines. The Immediate Mode GUI (IMGUI) paradigm is simple and powerful, letting you focus on the creative aspects of your projects.

• A lot of widgets and libraries: All of Dear ImGui along with a suite of additional libraries for plotting, node editing, markdown rendering, and much more.

• Cross-platform in C++ and Python: Works on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and WebAssembly!

• Web ready: Develop full web applications, in C++ via Emscripten; or in Python thanks to ImGui Bundle’s integration within Pyodide

• Always up-to-date: The libraries are always very close to the latest version of Dear ImGui. This is also true for Python developers, since the bindings are automatically generated.

• Interactive Demos and Documentation: Quickly get started with our interactive manual and demos that showcase the capabilities of the pack. Read or copy-paste the source code (Python and C++) directly from the interactive manual!

• Fast: Rendering is done via OpenGL (or any other renderer you choose), through native code.

• Beautifully documented Python bindings and stubs: The Python bindings stubs reflect the C++ API and documentation, serving as a reference and aiding autocompletion in your IDE. See for example the stubs for imgui, and for hello_imgui (which complete the hello_imgui manual).

For a detailed look at each feature and more information, explore the sections listed in the Table of Contents.

Introduction for Python Developers

If you are new to ImGui Bundle, and working with Python, here is a beginner-friendly introduction with practical examples, which should get you started in no time:

Immediate Mode GUI with Python and Dear ImGui Bundle

Interactive Manual

Click on the animated demonstration below to launch the fully interactive manual.

Online playground in Pure Python (via Pyodide)

Since ImGui Bundle is available in Python and Pyodide, an online playground will enable you to run and edit various ImGui applications in the browser without any setup.

See this page for more information about availability of ImGui Bundle in Pyodide.

Full manual (PDF)

View or download the full pdf for this manual.

You may feed it into a LLM such as ChatGPT, so that it can help you when using ImGui bundle.

Example code

A hello world example with Dear ImGui Bundle

For Python developers

from imgui_bundle import imgui, immapp
immapp.run(gui_function=lambda: imgui.text("Hello, world!"))

For C++ developers

#include "immapp/immapp.h"
#include "imgui.h"
int main() {   ImmApp::Run([] {   ImGui::Text("Hello, world!");   });  }

What’s in the pack?

Dear ImGui Bundle includes the following libraries, which are available in C++ and in Python:

A big thank you to their authors for their awesome work!

Install for Python

Install from pypi

pip install imgui-bundle  
pip install opencv-python 
pip install pyGLM 

• imgui_bundle: Binary wheels are available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. If a compilation from source is needed, the build process might take up to 5 minutes, and will require an internet connection.

• OpenCV: in order to run the immvision module, install opencv-python. The alternative OpenCV versions, such as opencv-python-headless (headless) opencv-contrib-python (with extra modules) also work.

• pyGLM: in order to run the demo, install pyGLM

Platform notes

• Windows: Under windows, you might need to install msvc redist.

• macOS : under macOS, if a binary wheel is not available (e.g. for older macOS versions), pip will try to compile from source. This might fail if you do not have XCode installed. In this case, install imgui-bundle with the following command SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=0 pip install --only-binary=:all: imgui_bundle

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/pthom/imgui_bundle.git
cd imgui_bundle
git submodule update --init --recursive 
pip install -v . 
pip install opencv-python
pip install pyGLM

• Since there are lots of submodules, this might take a few minutes

• The build process might take up to 5 minutes

Run the python demo

Simply run demo_imgui_bundle.

The source for the demos can be found inside bindings/imgui_bundle/demos_python.

Consider demo_imgui_bundle as an always available manual for Dear ImGui Bundle with lots of examples and related code source.

Closing words

Who is this project for

Dear ImGui Bundle aims to make applications prototyping fast and easy, in a multiplatform / multi-tooling context. The intent is to reduce the time between an idea and a first GUI prototype down to almost zero.

It is well adapted for

• developers and researchers who want to switch easily between and research and development environment by facilitating the port of research artifacts

• beginners and developers who want to quickly develop an application without learning a GUI framework

Who is this project not for

You should prefer a more complete framework (such as Qt for example) if your intent is to build a fully fledged application, with support for internationalization, advanced styling, etc.

Also, the library makes no guarantee of ABI stability, and its API is opened to slight adaptations and breaking changes if they are found to make the overall usage better and/or safer.

Acknowledgments

Dear ImGui Bundle would not be possible without the work of the authors of "Dear ImGui", and especially Omar Cornut.

It also includes a lot of other projects, and I’d like to thank their authors for their awesome work!

A particular mention for Evan Pezent (author of ImPlot), Cédric Guillemet (author of ImGuizmo), Balázs Jákó (author of ImGuiColorTextEdit), and Michał Cichoń (author of imgui-node-editor), and Dmitry Mekhontsev (author of imgui-md), Andy Borrel (author of imgui-tex-inspect, another image debugging tool, which I discovered long after having developed immvision).

This doc was built using Asciidoc.

Immvision was inspired by The Image Debugger, by Bill Baxter.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2021-2024 Pascal Thomet

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Alternatives

pyimgui provides battle-tested comprehensive python bindings for ImGui. I worked with this project a lot, and contributed a bit to it. In the end, I had to develop a separate project, in order to be able to add auto-generated and auto-documented python modules.

Dear PyGui (repository) provides python bindings for ImGui with a lot of addons, and a more pythonesque API, which makes it perhaps more suited for Python only projects.

About the author

Dear ImGui Bundle is developed by Pascal Thomet. I am reachable on my Github page. I sometimes blog. There is a playlist related to ImGui Bundle on YouTube.

I have a past in computer vision, and a lot of experience in the trenches between development and research teams; and I found ImGui to be a nice way to reduce the delay between a research prototype and its use in production code.

I also have an inclination for self documenting code, and the doc you are reading was a way to explore new ways to document projects.

How is Dear ImGui Bundle developed

The development of the initial version of Dear ImGui Bundle took about one year at full time.

The bindings are auto-generated thanks to an advanced parser, so that they are easy to keep up to date.

Please be tolerant if you find issues! Dear ImGui Bundle is developed for free, under a very permissive license, by one main author (and most of its API comes from external libraries).

If you need consulting about this library or about the bindings generator in the context of a commercial project, please contact me by email.

Contributions are welcome!

History

Three of my past projects gave me the idea to develop this library.

• ImGui Manual, an interactive manual for Dear ImGui, which I developed in June 2020

• implot demo which I developed in 2020.

• imgui_datascience, a python package I developed in 2018 for image analysis and debugging. Its successor is immvision.

Developments for Dear ImGui Bundle and its related automatic binding generator began in january 2022.