You'll want to decide on a GUI framework to start as you'll have to design quite a bit around it. Rnote is a good place to look, it uses GTK+libadwaita.
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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Perfect, thanks! I'll take a look at rnote.
I was also considering using a game engine like bevy to see if I could get something interesting going.
It is a very broad topic, you didn't specify what kind of a drawing program you'd want to make. If it's a simple raster drawing, like mspaint used to be, it is not that complicated to make. But complexity quickly adds up - filters, transforms, brushes, layers - it grows in complexity quickly. The easiest GUI in rust I found so far is egui. It provides an immediate mode for drawing graphics that is really simple to grasp very quickly. If it is the best in the long run is questionable, but to get your feet wet - I'd say is perfect
Yeah it's something I'd like to model after more complicated applications with transforms, layer effects, different brushes, etc. but I'm not looking to do that from the get go. At the beginning, probably just more similar to what ms paint used to be.
I'll take a look at egui, thanks!
What kind of drawing? Art or technical?
Art. Raster specifically, not looking to do vector at the moment.
There are a few basic things you need to sort out first. Keep it as simple as possible so start monochrome, and just add functionality to draw dots on a canvas. You'll need file handling capability almost immediately so figure out a way to (de-)serialise the information to recreate the artwork to read and write it to a file.
That'll keep you going for a few weeks, unless you're vibing it ~~in which case months~~ by which point you might have had other ideas of features to add, assuming you already know how to write GUI applications.
Interesting point about monochrome. If I remember correctly though, pixels are rendered with rgba values right? So does monochrome do anything programmatically different than color? Or maybe grayscale does?
And no, i'm not vibing this...i want to learn how to do this myself and not just regurgitate some hallucinated bullshit.
I am lacking in how to write GUI applications without using a game engine. I used a lot of Unity with C# and way before that I was using actionscript with Flash lol but other than a handful of WPF apps and WinForms with Powershell I haven't done straight GUI applications.
It's about keeping it simple: black and white only, which of course are RGB(0,0,0) and RGB(255,255,255). If you want to use colours, you need a colour selector which is unnecessary fluff at this point. Obviously it'll be a critical element fairly soon, but right at the start of the project it's (arguably of course) less important than the application structure and just getting an MVP together. If you want to do colours before you do File-Open and File-Save that's a valid choice.
Monochrome just means "a painting, drawing, or photograph in a single hue." But I think their intent was trying to describe an absolute minimum editor. Think Microsoft paint with the pencil tool but it only draws a single pixel per click.
Their list of things is fairly reasonable and will result in a fairly long main quests arc. Example. Depending on your familiarity with these items, as well as your familiarity with rust, it could keep you busy for a while in a non-throwaway way.
I wonder if part of the reason you're running into a wall is because you're asking what could be one of many different questions and haven't provided many hints to help infer intent.
For example, you could be asking "how do I write a Rust application with a GUI if Rust doesn't provide out of the box GUI functionality?" In the case you'll need to use one of the many GUI libraries that are out there. These will let you do screen layout, add buttons, etc.
You might also be asking, "am I going to have to build my own UI elements, like buttons and menus, from scratch?". The answer to this is no, unless you want some kind of new/novel UI element. For example, I made a checked list box item in C# about 8 years ago. All the GUI libraries will provide mechanisms to declare and position things like menus and buttons. They'll also provide hooks to let your application know the user did a thing.
Finally, you might be asking about how to actually draw/render the picture portion of your graphics editor. The GUI library you choose will significantly impact this. Example. Example. Example. Note that these may or may not be good choices to use.
I've been working with Bevy and egui, and have found it pretty nice. At the very least that might help get you started in your research.
Interesting. Are you using egui and bevy together or just you've been independently using them?
If you're using them together, what's the advantage of using egui instead of whatever internal Bevy GUI?
Using them together. Bevy is your "backend" and egui runs inside it and is used as your interface. Bevy, being a game engine bevy will be more than capable of doing the stuff you need.
I'm using the bevy_egui crate.
Ahh interesting.