Announcing CrymbleUI - a modern, native Crystal GUI framework

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Dear all,

ever missed a Crystal native GUI framework? Maybe you want to check out CrymbleUI.

From the README.md:

A nice and fast GUI framework for Crystal. Declarative and reactive.
Its name is a pun of Crystal and nimble :smiley:
CrymbleUI’s first line of code emerged 2.11.2025, 19:46.
Currently with SFML backend and for Linux. But easily portable to e.g. Windows.

All the best!

16 Likes
State & Plans of GUI development with Crystal
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Very cool! Is Mac OS supported too?

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@weirdbricks SFML does support Mac as well, it’s just I don’t have one and cannot supply default binaries for it - but maybe you can?

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Looks still early on, but you could at some point utilize GitHub Actions to generate binaries. I use it for a few Crystal projects. It’s helpful for finding compile issues cross platform as well. I generally have Mac, Linux arm64/amd64, and FreeBSD amd64 generate with each release. Probably still would recommend someone test to see if any runtime issues. I also have mine make docker images for the web apps.

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Thank you! I’ll give it a shot when I have a chance

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@Kritoke thanks for the hint, maybe someday later I will come around and manage to have a look :slight_smile:

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  • The URL in the shards.yml is misspelled: I lacks ‘ui‘ at the end.
  • What does source setup.sh do (what setup) ?
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I like it, <nitpicking>but why isn’t the text in the controls like edits, buttons etc. on the github screenshots properly vertically centered? Do you work with the font baseline?</nitpicking> ;)

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Thanks, found it - and fixed it
And for the source setup.sh: I included the SFML header files and precompiled binaries for Linux and Windows as shorthands, so that Crystal can find them when you do the “sourcing” (at least for Linux - it doesn’t include the pendant for Windows as of now).

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good take - seems like I missed it - I really had some tough fights with CC the last weeks :slight_smile:

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Looks nice. Are you using this in any projects?

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Looks awesome, congrats. There is an old but active GUi libs thread, State & Plans of GUI development with Crystal. I think it’d be nice to post this there, too.

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Actually, not yet. My rather big project Embrace is currently using DearImGui. But I had to do some ugly caching kludges in order not to fully break performance.

But I want to replace it with CrymbleUI, that’s why I started out on it shortly ago. For that I need to extract/disclose/adapt my virtual grid/matrix, plus some collapsable and probably some more. And then “just” migrate and bugfix :rofl:
I’m just running short of evenings lately…

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I have libsfml-*2.6 libraries on my Ubuntu 25.10 system - CrymbleUI is tied to 2.5.3 crsfml version - example and tutorial binaries are compiled OK, but I can’t run them - what can I do? Thanks!

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If you already have newer versions of SFML on your system, try to patch the setup.sh locally to meet your system configuration. I hope this works - this is sort of odd that it compiles/links, but doesn’t run. It probably complains about libs not being found then? If you still have issues maybe you want to raise an issue on github and give more context still.