Reflex - A GUI toolkit for Ruby

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⚠️ Notice

This repository is a read-only mirror of our monorepo. We do not accept pull requests or direct contributions here.

🔄 Where to Contribute?

All development happens in our xord/all monorepo, which contains all our main libraries. If you'd like to contribute, please submit your changes there.

For more details, check out our Contribution Guidelines.

Thanks for your support! 🙌

🚀 About

Reflex is a cross-platform GUI toolkit for Ruby. It gives you a Window with a tree of View objects, an event-driven runtime (Application / on_draw, on_update, on_pointer, ...), and bindings to a 2D physics engine, MIDI I/O, and live camera capture — all sitting on top of the Rays drawing engine.

It is the application layer underneath Processing, RubySketch, and Reight. Like the rest of the xord/* family, Reflex is primarily developed for our own use, but it also works as a standalone GUI / creative-coding toolkit.

The gem name is reflexion (not reflex) — gem install reflexion. The Ruby namespace is Reflex.

📋 Requirements

  • Ruby 3.0.0 or later
  • A C++ compiler with C++20 support
  • Xot, Rucy, and Rays (declared as runtime dependencies)
  • Platform GUI backend:
    • macOS — AppKit (bundled with the OS)
    • iOS — UIKit (bundled with the OS)
    • Windows — native Win32
    • Linux — libsdl2-dev

The following third-party libraries are cloned from GitHub and statically linked while the native extension is being built:

Library Role
Box2D 2D physics simulation (View bodies, ContactEvent, gravity, fixtures)
RtMidi MIDI I/O — exposes MidiEvent, NoteEvent, ControlChangeEvent to views

📦 Installation

Add this line to your Gemfile:

gem 'reflexion'

Then install:

$ bundle install

Or install it directly:

$ gem install reflexion

require 'reflex' automatically calls Reflex.init! (and Rays.init!) and registers Reflex.fin! at exit. Set $REFLEX_NOAUTOINIT = true before requiring if you want to manage the lifetime yourself.

📚 What's Included

Application / Window / View

Class Purpose
Reflex::Application Run loop; created and started by Reflex.start { ... }
Reflex::Window OS-level window with title, frame, flags (closable / resizable / fullscreen / portrait / landscape)
Reflex::View Recursive UI node: position, size, transform, styles, child views, optional clipping / caching
Reflex::Screen Information about a display monitor
Reflex::Timer One-shot or interval timer that delivers TimerEvent

Shapes (drawing + physics body)

A view can carry one or more Shape objects that act both as its drawn appearance and as its physics fixture. Built-ins:

  • Reflex::RectShape
  • Reflex::EllipseShape
  • Reflex::LineShape
  • Reflex::PolygonShape — wraps a Rays::Polygon

Events

Every event class inherits from Reflex::Event. Views receive them via on_<name> hooks (or on(:name) / before(:name) / after(:name) from Xot::Hookable).

Event class View hook When it fires
UpdateEvent on_update Every frame, before drawing
DrawEvent on_draw Every frame, to render with e.painter
FrameEvent on_frame_* Frame resize / move
FocusEvent on_focus Keyboard focus gained / lost
KeyEvent on_key Key down / up / repeat
PointerEvent on_pointer Mouse / touch down / move / up
WheelEvent on_wheel Scroll wheel / trackpad scroll
ScrollEvent on_scroll The view itself scrolled
MidiEvent / NoteEvent / ControlChangeEvent on_midi / on_note / on_control_change Incoming MIDI message
CaptureEvent on_capture New frame from a Rays::Camera
TimerEvent on_timer Fired by start_timer / start_interval
ContactEvent on_contact_* Two physics bodies began / ended overlapping
DeviceEvent / MotionEvent various Device-level signals (accelerometer / gyro / connection)

Styling and selectors

Reflex::Style and Reflex::Selector (with HasSelector) provide a lightweight CSS-style mechanism for setting background, padding, layout, etc., on views.

Two ways to use the gem

The gem ships two complementary APIs:

  1. require 'reflex' — the full OO API. Subclass Reflex::Window, override on_draw / on_update / on_pointer, build a view hierarchy, etc.
  2. require 'reflexion/include' — a single-file, Processing-style API that exposes top-level setup, draw, update, key, pointer, motion blocks and auto-starts the application on at_exit.

💡 Usage

Hello, Reflex (OO style)

require 'reflex'

class HelloWindow < Reflex::Window
  def initialize
    super title: 'Hello Reflex!', frame: [100, 100, 320, 240]
    painter.font = Reflex::Font.new('Menlo', 32)
    painter.background = 0
    painter.fill = 1
  end

  def on_draw(e)
    e.painter.text 'hello world!', 5, 5
  end

  def on_update(e)
    painter.background = rand, rand, rand
    redraw
  end
end

Reflex.start do
  HelloWindow.new.show
end

Block / DSL style

require 'reflex'

Reflex.start do
  Reflex::Window.show title: 'Shapes', frame: [100, 100, 500, 300] do
    def on_draw(e)
      e.painter.push do
        fill   :pink
        stroke 1
        stroke_width 2
        rect    10, 10, 80, 80, 10
        ellipse 120, 10, 80, 80
      end
    end
  end
end

Reflexion (Processing-style single-file)

require 'reflexion/include'

setup do
  window.title = 'Reflexion!'
end

draw do |p|
  p.background 0
  p.fill 1
  p.text 'hello from reflexion', 10, 30
end

pointer do |e|
  puts "pointer at #{e.pos.to_a.inspect}"
end
# Reflexion.start is called automatically at_exit

2D physics with Box2D

require 'reflex'

Reflex.start name: 'Physics' do |app|
  Reflex::Window.show title: app.name, frame: [100, 100, 500, 500] do
    gravity 0, 9.8 * meter

    50.times do
      add Reflex::View.new {
        pos        rand(10..400), rand(10..100)
        size       rand(5..50)
        background [:red, :green, :blue, :yellow, :orange].sample
        dynamic    true
        shape      Reflex::EllipseShape.new(density: 1)
      }
    end

    add Reflex::View.new {     # a static ground
      pos        0, 480
      size       500, 20
      background :darkgray
      static     true
    }

    on :pointer do |e|
      if e.down? || e.drag?
        add Reflex::View.new(pos: e.pos, size: 10, dynamic: true,
                             shape: Reflex::EllipseShape.new(density: 1))
      end
    end
  end
end

See the samples/ directory for more examples covering shapes, layout, models, MIDI, camera capture, etc.

🛠️ Development

$ rake vendor   # clone Box2D and RtMidi into vendor/
$ rake lib      # build the native C++ library (libreflex)
$ rake ext      # build the Ruby C extension
$ rake test     # run the test suite
$ rake doc      # generate RDoc from C++ sources
$ rake          # default: builds the extension

The test suite requires a windowing system, so CI only runs it on macOS. The test_reflex_init.rb test must run in its own process and is listed in TESTS_ALONE.

In the xord/all monorepo you can scope by module, e.g. rake reflex test.

📜 License

Reflex is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

The third-party libraries listed above retain their own licenses (Box2D: MIT, RtMidi: MIT-style).