Background:

In my journey for learning Rust, I've started a side project called MyStudio IDE which is, as the name implies, an IDE built on Rust.

Shoutout to Andreas Kling and his Serenity OS project for inspiration.

This project is meant as a learning experience. If you're hoping for something like VS Code, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

Let's build a Hello world GTK program with Rust!

Prerequisites:

1. GTK3 LINK

2. Rust Lang, Cargo, etc. LINK

3. VS Code, subl, etc.

Terminology:

crate:

An external library that contains modules and provides some functionality.

crates.io:

The Rust lang's official package registry. It's NPM for Rust.

cargo:

Cargo is a CLI tool to work with Rust projects. A beginner's analogy to this would be JS Angular's ng CLI tool.

Project Setup:

I create a new project by running:

cargo new my-studio

You should see output similar to:

~/projects: cargo new my-studio

Created binary (application) `my-studio` package

By default, cargo provides us with a hello world. Let's run it.

~/projects: cd my-studio
~/projects/my-studio: cargo run

This will take time. Please be patient...

After sometime, you'll see something like this:

Compiling my-studio v0.1.0 (/home/user/projects/my-studio)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.80s
Running `target/debug/my-studio`
Hello, world!

Cool! Let's move on.

GTK + Rust

Let's add the gtk-rs crate to Cargo.toml at the project root. So, Cargo.toml is like package.json for Rust.

Cargo.toml

[package]
name = "my-studio"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2018"


[dependencies]
gtk-rs="0.14.2"  #  <-- Include it here

At the time of writing, 0.14.2 is the latest version of the crate. Please check crates.io for new releases.

Hello World

This code is borrowed from gtk-rsrepo on GitHub. Link

use gtk::prelude::*;

fn build_ui(application: &gtk::Application) {
    let window = gtk::ApplicationWindow::new(application);

    window.set_title("First GTK+ Program");
    window.set_border_width(10);
    window.set_position(gtk::WindowPosition::Center);
    window.set_default_size(350, 70);

    let button = gtk::Button::with_label("Click me!");

    window.add(&button);

    window.show_all();
}

fn main() {
    let application =
        gtk::Application::new(Some("com.github.gtk-rs.examples.basic"), Default::default());

    application.connect_activate(build_ui);

    application.run();
}

Output:

Hope you liked it! Feel free to @ me on Twitter on your thoughts on this. Bye :)