Introduction

Minimal GUI example projects using ImGui & SDL2 make with CMake.

• imgui - Minimal GUI.
• SDL2 - Multimedia layer library.

Using ImGui in a CMake Project

To use the ImGui in a CMake project one should copy the following files:

• 3rdparty/imgui - directory with ImGui headers copied from the original repository. This is not a git module, so the files are not updated automatically.
• cmake/imgui.cmake - CMake module that defines variables IMGUI_LIBRARIES and IMGUI_INCLUDE_DIR.

Environment Setup

Debian-based Systems

The following instructions apply to:

• Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04, 20.04
• Debian 12, 11

sudo apt-get install -y \
    build-essential \
    cmake \
    xorg-dev \
    libgl1-mesa-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev \
    libsdl2-dev

RedHat-based Systems

The following instructions apply to:

• Fedora 22 and higher

sudo dnf install -y \
    gcc gcc-c++ make \
    cmake \
    mesa-libGL-devel \
    libXrandr-devel \
    libXinerama-devel \
    libXcursor-devel \
    libXi-devel \
    freetype-devel \
    SDL2-devel

macOS systems

Install SDL2 libraries using brew:

brew install sdl2

Building

Check out sources with --recursive parameter for 3rd-party libraries:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Postrediori/SdlImGui.git

Prepare build with CMake and build executable

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make

Running

Using make install will copy the executable to bundle directory:

cd build
make install

Run the binaries from bundle folder:

cd bundle

# SDL2 & OpenGL 2 demo project
./bundle/SdlImGuiOpenGl2

# SDL2 & OpenGL 3 demo project
./bundle/SdlImGuiOpenGl3

# SDL2 & SDL_Renderer demo project
./bundle/SdlRendererImGui

TODO

• SDL3 demo project