Providing API docs similar to pyimgui

[kushalkolar]

Hi! I'm one of the maintainers of fastplotlib and we and our collaborators/users use imgui via imgui-bundle a lot. One minor inconvenience right now is that there's no "API docs" for imgui-bundle in the sense that I can for example lookup how to create a slider, what it looks like, and what the args and flags are all in one place. We usually look at the pyimgui API docs to get an idea of the UI element we want, but there are differences between the args in pyimgui and the python bindings of imgui-bundle so we then lookup the source code within imgui-bundle to finalize what we need.

I'm not the biggest fan of LLMs but I did get claude to create a sphinx extension to auto-gen API docs similar to pyimgui for the imgui-bundle python bindings, and uses the wgpu offscreen renderer to create screenshots of each example to show what the UI element looks like: fastplotlib/fastplotlib#1066 (comment)

I think this could be of general use to other imgui-bundle users so I'm wondering if you think it would make sense to have docs like this here.

Thanks for continuing to maintain this! Imgui lets us create UIs that run anywhere, it's especially useful when we run visualization apps on remote compute infrastructure where you can't use Qt. 😄

[pthom]

Hi,
Thank you very much for the proposition. It is quite interesting. Give me a few days to thing about it.

In the meantime could you also take a look at Dear ImGui Explorer, as its intent is to provide an interactive manual with live examples for C++ and python.

With your combo box example it looks like:

[pthom]

Could you give me a more complete example,

[kushalkolar]

Yup we do use the explorer sometimes which is a combination of examples in a ways, but they serve a different purpose from API docs which allow us to quickly look at a list of available UI elements, the function call signatures, all the types for the args, flags, etc.

I don't have an example of built UI element API docs for imgui-bundle online yet, but it's basically analogous to the pyimgui API docs. The only differences are the subtle differences between the types and function signatures between them: https://pyimgui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/imgui.core.html#imgui.core.slider_int

[pthom]

, yes this would make sense and I would appreciate this.
However, there are added complexities vs pyimgui

1/ regular updates: the bundle is updated very regularly. So ideally parts of the doc should be updatable in a semi automatic way.

2/ the API is available in Python and C++ an ideally such a doc should be available for both.

A first non updatable version python only would help, but the general goal is for a more automated one.

Would you be willing to help ? I would of course be involved
Thanks !

[kushalkolar]

Yes I'd be able to help, this will help our users too so I'd like to get some version of this out to start with.