What Nifty supports

Nifty is at version 0: the smallest language that can build a polished counter and todo app. Everything in it is meant to stay; later versions add to it. This page says what works today, what’s being built now, and what isn’t there yet.

Platforms

Where the two platforms draw a setting differently, its entry in UI elements or Built-in functions says how.

Supported

• The full v0 language: state, functions, structs, lists, views and windows.
• Loops that name each item’s position, for index, item in items, and loops that count, for i in 0..n.
• Apps split across files: every .nf file in the project folder is part of the app, in the CLI, nf dev reloads and the editor.
• Built-in UI elements, with flexbox layout, and label colors, alignment and selectable text.
• Surfaces: sidebars, content panes and cards drawn with each platform’s own materials, fixed and limited widths, and windows that stay wide enough for their content.
• Icons from the system’s own sets, borderless and icon-only buttons, a large title style, and selectable sidebar rows (nav_item).
• Progress bars, filled to a percentage or showing that work is under way.
• Scrolling areas, which scroll their content up and down in the space they’re given.
• Switches, sliders for whole numbers, and pickers that choose a string from a list.
• A selected state for buttons, for picking one of a few choices.
• Text fields several lines tall, which wrap and scroll.
• Images from files, at their own size or a fixed width or height.
• A text field’s own action, run on Return.
• Menus and keyboard shortcuts: the menu bar on macOS, and every window’s menu bar on Windows.
• Context menus, shown when the user right-clicks a stack.
• Opening and closing windows from code, with windows that start closed.
• Dropping files and links onto a stack, which writes their paths and addresses into state.
• Window backdrops: a translucent window on macOS, and Mica or Acrylic in the frame on Windows 11.
• download, which saves a file from the web in the background and reports its progress into state: a percentage, a status, the bytes received, the file’s size and the speed, which format_bytes shows as text such as 1.5 MB. Each download has an id, which keeps its reports with its list item and which pause_download, resume_download and cancel_download take; resuming continues with an HTTP range request, or starts over when the server can’t send part of a file. A download can fetch its file over several connections at once, be saved under a name the app chooses, send request headers, and retry failed connections after a wait.
• File dialogs: pick_file, pick_files, pick_folder and pick_save_path ask the user for a path with the system’s own Open and Save dialogs.
• nf create, nf check, nf run, and nf dev, which reloads the app on every save and keeps its state.
• nf build, which compiles your app to machine code and packages it to share.
• Editor support in VS Code and Zed through nf lsp.

In progress

• Download control: several connections per file, choosing the file name, and request headers and retries (#18).

Not supported yet

Platforms and tooling

• A Linux (GTK) backend, so nf build --linux works too.
• nf build on Windows without installing Microsoft’s C++ Build Tools first, by shipping a linker with nf.
• Mica and Acrylic behind the content of Windows windows, not just their frame. The system’s own controls can’t draw on a see-through background, so this waits on Nifty drawing its own controls.

Language

• State that belongs to one view, instead of the whole app.
• Passing bindings into views, so your own views can edit values.
• Keyed for loops that keep unchanged rows instead of rebuilding them.
• Enums and match. Until then, a choice such as a filter is a string.
• Constants. Until then, a named value is a function that returns it.
• Functions as values (closures).
• More list and string methods. Lists and strings have len and is_empty, and lists have push and remove; filtering, counting, sorting and searching are loops for now, and wait on closures.

UI

• Images that come with an app, which nf build bundles and the app finds next to its code. Images read from full paths, and paths from ~, work today.
• Custom drawing.

Doing more

• More background work, networking and files, building on download: other requests, and reading and writing files.

Have an idea?

Open an issue. The language specification records why the syntax looks the way it does, so check there first if you’re proposing a change to it.