Fluxent

A WinUI 3-style Fluent UI framework written in pure C (C17), layered directly on the Win32 / DirectX stack. Fluxent renders Fluent Design controls, drives them with a retained node store, and integrates with Windows platform services through cwinrt (pure-C WinRT bindings).

Features

• Dual render backend, selected once at startup by capability:
  • Direct2D / DirectWrite immediate-mode swap chain — the default path, with a render-command list, snapshot diffing, and a per-node render cache.
  • Windows.UI.Composition retained visual tree — opt-in via FLUX_USE_COMPOSITION=1; per-node surfaces, compositor-thread color animations, and InteractionTracker scrolling. Falls back to Direct2D over Remote Desktop.
• Platform integration via WinRT (cwinrt): true system accent color + light/dark theme and change events (UISettings), locale-aware NumberBox formatting (Globalization.NumberFormatting), compositor animations and InteractionTracker (UI.Composition[.Interactions]).
• DirectWrite text rendering with grapheme-cluster–aware caret/selection.
• Inertial scrolling — DirectManipulation on the Direct2D path, InteractionTracker on the composition path.
• Accessibility — a Win32 UI Automation provider (control types, patterns, focus/invoke events).
• Theming — light/dark palettes driven by the live system accent.
• Plugin hook — register custom renderers per control type via the plugin registry.

Controls

Buttons (standard / toggle / repeat / hyperlink), Checkbox, RadioButton, ToggleSwitch, Slider, ProgressBar, ProgressRing, TextBox, PasswordBox, NumberBox, ScrollViewer, Card, InfoBadge, Divider, List, TabView, plus Flyout, MenuFlyout, and Tooltip popups. Image and Canvas have type slots with partial support.

Build

xmake                        # debug build (default)
xmake f -m release && xmake  # release build
xmake run hello_fluxent      # run the showcase demo

FLUX_USE_COMPOSITION=1 xmake run hello_fluxent exercises the composition backend.

Requires Windows 10 1903+, a C17 compiler (MSVC or MinGW/Clang), and xmake.

Dependencies

• xent-core
• cwinrt

Status

The Direct2D backend is the stable default. The composition backend is functional (DPI scaling, theming, scrolling, and most controls render identically to Direct2D) but still being hardened — in-window acrylic backdrops are currently disabled, and it remains opt-in behind FLUX_USE_COMPOSITION.

License

0BSD