Roadmap and status
What works today, what's partial, and what's coming next, straight from the repository's status tables.
Here’s the honest picture. Most of BUI works today, a few parts are partial, and some are still plans. This page tells you which is which, so you never have to guess.
Each row has a status: Works when it works and is tested, Partial when common cases work but pieces are missing, Experimental when it’s written but not yet proven on real hardware, and Planned when it’s planned but not built.
Done
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| C runtime (the kit) | Works | Nodes, Tk-style geometry managers, input, Blender widget drawing, damage rendering, undo, animation, text areas, canvases, scroll views, Blender's string search, expression evaluator, text-edit undo and float precision |
| Native windows | Works | Windows (Win32) and Linux (X11; Wayland through XWayland): DPI-aware, frame-paced animation, clipboard, cursors |
| Themes | Works | Blender's Dark (default) and Light presets, switchable at run time from every language, or with BUI_THEME |
| tkinter syntax | Works | Every public tkinter and ttk name: 7,846 of 7,846 |
| Blender components | Works | 45 components, including the color ramp, curve and node editors |
| Rust | Works | All 113 HTML elements, flexbox, grid, CSS 2.1, modern CSS, animations, Tailwind v4, rsx! and gpui-style builders, #[component], hooks, Blender components, headless testing |
| Dear ImGui | Works | The real Dear ImGui 1.93 on BUI (CPU, Direct3D 11, OpenGL); C++, C (399 of 399 functions), Python and Rust; the Blender-widgets build |
| Rendering | Works | Parallel, damage-tracked software raster; GPU renderer on Direct3D 11 (Windows) and OpenGL 3.3 (Linux) |
| JavaScript and React | Works | @blender-ui/native and @blender-ui/react on Node.js and Bun; bui build standalone executables |
| Packaging | Works | blenderui on PyPI with wheels for every platform; blenderui on crates.io; @blender-ui/react and @blender-ui/native on npm |
Partial or in progress
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Qt syntax | Partial | About 25% of Qt's methods on the main widget classes. Missing: model/view classes, docks, toolbars, splitters, Qt stylesheets |
| CSS (Rust, JavaScript) | Partial | 261 of 745 W3C properties render and 129 more parse. Missing: 3D transforms, OpenType font features, multi-column layout |
| Text | Partial | No text wrapping around floats; right-to-left text is reordered but not shaped; no per-glyph font fallback yet; no IME |
| Rust components | Partial | No async resources (use_resource) and no generic components yet |
| Dear ImGui | Partial | Python and safe Rust skip the va_list, void* and C-callback functions; in the Blender-widgets build, title bars, tooltips, plain popups, tables and the color picker keep ImGui's drawing |
| npm packages | Partial | Prebuilt for Windows x64 only; on Linux, build the addon from source |
| macOS | Experimental | The Cocoa window host is written but not yet run on a Mac (testing guide); JavaScript is headless there; no GPU renderer yet |
blenderui-imgui on crates.io | Partial | The main blenderui crate is published; the Dear ImGui crate isn't yet, so use it as a git dependency |
Partial Partly thereExperimental Written, not yet proven
Planned
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| WebAssembly | Planned | The kit in the browser: the raster blits to a <canvas>, DOM events feed the kit, and the React and DOM-like APIs run on top, unchanged |
| egui | Planned | BUI panels inside egui, plus a Blender-styled theme |
| More from Blender's source | Planned | Per-glyph font fallback (BLF), IME, search-as-you-type popups, units in number fields, widget drag and drop |
| macOS GPU and JavaScript windows | Planned | The GPU renderer on Metal (or the OpenGL backend), and Node windows on the main thread |
| More GPU backends | Planned | Vulkan and WebGPU, drawing the same instance stream as Direct3D 11 and OpenGL |
| More languages | Planned | MyGo, C#, Go, Zig, Swift, Kotlin and Lua over the same C header; Godot, Unity and Bevy; Flutter |
Docs pages on the way
The documentation grows alongside BUI. These lists come straight from the pages themselves, so they’re always current.
Coming soon
Every planned page is written. Nice.
In preview
Help make it happen
The quickest wins are the experimental rows: if you have a Mac, running the Cocoa host and reporting what happens is enormously useful. The macOS testing guide walks you through it. Bug reports, missing tkinter or Qt behaviour, CSS features and docs are all welcome too. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.
Next steps
Last updated