As I’ve been experimenting with writing Rust apps, I attempted to create a small little GUI application. At first I attempted to setup everything with Qt, but C++/Qt interoperability with Rust is painful. Very, very painful. I experimented with some more radical UI frameworks such as Azul and Conrad. These have a lot of promise going forward. However for the here and now, I recommend looking at gtk-rs, Rust binding for Gtk.

With a bit of experimentation, looking through gtk-rs examples, some other projects using gtk-rs, and lots and lots of searching, I was able to create this:

This is a code viewer that lets you open Rust code, and view it. Yes, you are looking at a portion of the code that runs that code viewer. Getting the GtkSourceView working took some coaxing. Also I had to learn how to use the Glade UI editor for Gtk. Overall it took me about 2 to 3 hours to pull this off. I am very impressed with the results, and it opens up new possibilities for me.