egui-tao

July 7, 2025 · View on GitHub

🚧 NOW SUCEEDED BY tauri-plugin-egui.

Check if we can render egui-based UI to a tao window, to eventually integrate with Tauri.

Try cargo run --example demo to see a window.

demo app screenshot

goals + motivations

I have a (med-large) Tauri app that needs to render UI without the webview/browser overhead for some cases. egui seemed like it can work well for this.

So we splice across some tools and end up with:

  1. tauri (which uses tao underneath) for overall application and window management
  2. egui to render some Rust-based stateful UI to graphics
  3. wgpu, egui-wgpu to paint the graphics onto a window/surface

There's been a previous attempt at this by the Tauri team, detailed here but it has since been de-prioritized due to a large maintainance surface-area. My approach is similar, except that I'm trying to minimize "fork maintainance" as much as possible.

This is a crude draft. Ideally, we'd contribute 2 official projects to the ecosystem:

  1. An egui-tao crate in the egui repo, similar to egui-winit.
  2. A tauri-plugin-egui in the tauri-apps/plugins-workspace repo.

I use the word official to denote support from the original project maintainers + ensuring some degree of code quality that I may not be capable of individually.

My next steps are:

  1. solve my own use-case for Helmer app.
  2. check if there is interest in this project by the involved projects and communities.
  3. explore ways of working on this with others if interested (assuming 2 goes well).

update 4th july 2025

I realized that the tauri-egui integration goes a little deeper than just rendering UI in a tauri window. It wraps eframe, a full application manager designed for egui and handles bi-directional communication between tauri windows and eframe windows, so you can use the API of your choice to manage them.

This is overkill for my use + forces us to maintain multiple "soft forks". I'm better off making a leaner integration where the Window handle from tauri can be used to as a render target for some egui, but the app/window control responsibility lies exclusively with the Tauri runtime, not eframe/egui.

update 7th july 2025

This repo was a good learning experience and serves as a good starting point. But to ultimately get it running within tauri, we need a tauri plugin. So I'm stopping work on this repo and shifting focus to tauri-plugin-egui.