# egui_flex

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[content]:<>


## When should I use egui_flex?
I recommend you to use this lightly, and prefer using egui's built-in layout features where possible.
I only use this crate in places where I need something that is impossible using egui's built-in layout features, or 
where a lot of custom math would be required.

## Overview

I was curious how much of flexbox I could implement in egui in a single-pass layout, by just remembering the sizes
of widgets from the previous frame. Turns out it's quite a lot!

First of all, [here is a good refresher](https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/) of
what all the different flex keywords mean.

#### The following things work as expected:

- flex-direction: row and column work as expected (I've named them horizontal and vertical to match egui's layout names)
- flex-grow: you can give items a grow factor and they will grow to exactly fill the available space. An item with
  grow: 2 will grow twice as much as an item with grow: 1

  ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2a9e665a-8a4d-4dc3-aa28-6b11db7714b0)

- align-items / align-self:

  ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0224c32b-39bb-4be4-9dcf-09b23ba59cae)

- align-items-content / align-self-content: egui-specific property I added to help align an item's content if it
  has `grow > 0.0 || align_self == Stretch`

- nested flex containers work and will grow as expected _as long as they don't wrap_:

  ![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e2c7a742-8307-4f3c-ae2e-b92f0e1c2529)

  Every group in the screenshot represents a flex container or flex item so this shows flexes nested three levels deep.

  You can't arbitrarily nest flexes in child ui's, you have to use a special method on the flex builder to add nested
  flexes, because it needs to communicate it's minimal size to the parent flex.

- flex-wrap
  wrap and no-wrap works, wrap-reverse is not implemented
    - if `wrap`, items will fill the row and wrap once they reach Ui::available_width()
    - else, items will fill the row and overflow if they don't fit

#### The following things aren't implemented yet but should be possible:

- justify-content: should be easy to add
- handling wrapping in nested flex: not 100% certain but I think this should be possible
- max width: with flex-grow it's currently not possible to set a max width right now

#### The following things are not possible

- flex shrink:
  Getting a items intrinsic size requires adding the item without limiting it's size and to shrink an item we must limit
  it's size.
  Shrinking an item with a fixed size should in theory be possible.

Here's a demo showing how nice things flow into the next row when resizing the window:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3f8d324e-7e51-4f4b-9415-f2d61e24d322

### Real world example

Finally, I wanted to share a real world example how flex can improve the ui by a lot. In
the [hello_egui demo app](https://lucasmerlin.github.io/hello_egui/) I have a list of crates displayed as small tags in
the sidebar. When just shown with ui.horizontal_wrapped it looks really weird:

![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5d5c0e59-7eb7-465f-a4a5-580f9d023150)

When updated to use egui_flex it looks much nicer:

![image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a36240bf-db08-4046-9d83-2b62f5c512b1)

### Example

Here is a simple example of how to use egui_flex:

```rust no_run
use eframe::NativeOptions;
use egui::{Button, CentralPanel};
use egui_flex::{item, Flex, FlexAlignContent};

fn main() -> eframe::Result {
    eframe::run_ui_native(file!(), NativeOptions::default(), |ui, _frame| {
        CentralPanel::default().show(ui, |ui| {
            Flex::horizontal().show(ui, |flex| {
                flex.add(item().grow(1.0), Button::new("Growing button"));
                flex.add(item(), Button::new("Non-growing button"));

                // Nested flex
                flex.add_flex(
                    item().grow(1.0),
                    // We need the FlexAlignContent::Stretch to make the buttons fill the space
                    Flex::vertical().align_content(FlexAlignContent::Stretch),
                    |flex| {
                        flex.add(item(), Button::new("Vertical button"));
                        flex.add(item(), Button::new("Another Vertical button"));
                    },
                );
            });
        });
    })
}

```
