NWindows

NWindows is a cross-platform window creation and management library for .NET.

NWindows is aimed to provide all the infrastructure to manipulate a Window in a cross-platform manner and to interact with the input.

It is primarily meant to be used to create higher level applications (games, multimedia apps) or UI Frameworks.

NOTICE: The first version is only supporting the Windows 10+ platform. Help wanted for other platforms! 🤗

Features

• Very lightweight with zero-dependencies .NET 7+ library.
• GC friendly (Zero allocation for the events).
• NativeAOT/trimmable library (including the "reflection free mode")
  • You can create a small app under 1.5 MB.
• Create top-level and popup windows.
  • Support for border-less windows.
  • Support for OS theme sync.
• Input support: keyboard, mouse + cursor, text.
• DPI aware and sync with OS changes.
• Clipboard and Drag&Drop support.
• FullScreen mode support.
• Many modifiable properties with events
  • Size, position, visibility, maximize/minimum size, icon, resize-able, minimize-able, maximize-able, top-most, opacity, modal...
• Screen properties.
• Dispatcher threading infrastructure built-in to handle System and Window messages (similar to WPF Dispatcher)
• Timer support

Getting started

using NWindows;
using NWindows.Threading;
using System.Drawing;

var mainWindow = Window.Create(new()
{
    Title = "Hello World",
    StartPosition = WindowStartPosition.CenterScreen,
    BackgroundColor = WindowSettings.Theme == WindowTheme.Light
        ? Color.FromArgb(245, 245, 245)
        : Color.FromArgb(30, 30, 30)
});

Dispatcher.Current.Run();

will create the following window on Windows:

You will find more examples in the sample folder.

Install

NWindows is provided as a NuGet package.

User Guide

For more details on how to use NWindows, please visit the user guide.

License

This software is released under the BSD-2-Clause license.

Credits

NWindows is using the following libraries:

• The fantastic TerraFX.Interop.Windows for the interop layer with Windows API.

  This library is integrated with a custom codegen Roslyn tool that will copy all the transitive usage of TerraFX and internalize them into this repository to avoid the the whole TerraFX library to be visible to NWindows's users.

  In the end, this copy is only adding 45KB of .NET code to NWindows instead of the 15MB dependency of the whole TerraFX library.

Author

Alexandre Mutel aka xoofx.