Twinkle

Twinkle is a native Rust UI engine with declarative, typed views; intrinsic layout; keyboard and controller input; accessibility semantics; and an included software presenter.

The project is currently pre-1.0 (0.2). It is suitable for evaluation and early adoption, but public APIs may still change between minor releases. See support and compatibility before adopting it in a production application.

Try it

Twinkle requires Rust 1.96 or newer. On Ubuntu, install the native window and controller development libraries first:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y pkg-config libudev-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev \
  libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxrandr-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

Then clone the repository and run the standalone counter:

git clone https://github.com/shortontech/twinkle.git
cd twinkle
cargo run -p twinkle-ui --example standalone
cargo run -p twinkle-ui --example form_validation
cargo run -p twinkle-ui --example headless

To use Twinkle from another project while releases are not yet published, add the Git dependency:

[dependencies]
twinkle-ui = { git = "https://github.com/shortontech/twinkle.git", rev = "REPLACE_WITH_A_COMMIT_SHA" }

Pinning a commit keeps builds reproducible while the API is evolving. Once twinkle-ui is published on crates.io, the equivalent versioned dependency will be twinkle-ui = "0.2".

Copy crates/twinkle/examples/standalone.rs into src/main.rs, then run cargo run. The example shows the complete application lifecycle: state, typed messages, update, view, and native startup.

For an explanation of the application model and the next practical steps, read the getting-started guide. The detailed component and layout reference lives in the twinkle-ui crate guide. Build local API documentation with cargo doc -p twinkle-ui --open; after publication it will also be available on docs.rs.

Repository commands

cargo run -p twinkle-ui --example standalone
cargo run -p twinkle-workbench
cargo run -p twinkle-workbench --features jsx --bin twinkle-jsx-preview
cargo check --workspace --all-targets --all-features
cargo test --workspace --all-features

The main twinkle-ui package enables native controller discovery by default. Hosted-controller and controller-free applications can use default-features = false to omit gilrs; native windowing, software presentation, clipboard, and image support remain core capabilities. JSX is not part of its dependency closure. Repository tools that execute JSX enable the separate jsx feature on twinkle-workbench or twinkle-presentation; those builds include Oxc and V8.

The standalone TSX preview uses native controls and controller input with an explicit bounded ordinary effect dispatcher. It installs no host services or privileged action authority. Applications add their own service schemas, policy, and protected effect dispatch through host adapters.

Twinkle uses upstream winit's cross-platform data-transfer API; see window integration. Source is licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0 except separately licensed dependencies. Twinkle is adopted by Nickel.

Project information

• Getting started
• Common application tasks
• Building reusable Rust components
• Embedding JSX and CSS in a Rust host
• Supported CSS subset
• Workspace crate map
• Accessibility capabilities
• Native transactional Redux
• Troubleshooting
• Support, platforms, and compatibility
• Contributing
• Security policy
• Changelog
• License / Apache license