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portable ruby guis

20 starsRuby

Run GUIs as Scripts

by zero-st4rs·Apr 10, 2026·22 points·7 comments
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AI Analysis

●MidNiche GemBold Bet

Raylib and MRuby for portable Ruby GUIs, but Electron and Tauri dominate.

Strengths
  • •Single binary deployment with no runtime dependencies on target machines.
  • •Cross-compilation workflow builds for Windows, OSX, and Linux from one repo.
  • •MRuby keeps the runtime lightweight compared to full CRuby distributions.
Weaknesses
  • •Documentation is explicitly in progress; critical for framework adoption.
  • •Ruby GUI frameworks are a graveyard; Shoes, FXRuby, and others failed to gain traction.
Target Audience

Ruby developers wanting native GUI apps without Electron

Similar To

Electron · Tauri · Shoes

Post Description

Hi there, Zero Stars here.

I recently published some new work to Hokusai Pocket, which is a cross-platform binary made on top of raylib and MRuby that runs GUIs from ruby scripts.

License?

MIT!

How does it work?

The binary is available on the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/skinnyjames/hokusai-pocket/releases/tag/0...

You can download the binary on x86 Windows, OSX, or Linux, and run your GUI application with

hokusai-pocket run:target="<your_hokusai_app.rb>"

For a little bit of a hello world, I started a photoshop clone

https://github.com/skinnyjames/hokusai_demo_paint

Also a little game

https://github.com/skinnyjames/pocket-squares

Docs / Help?

The docs are in progress, but the old docs for the CRuby version express some of the basic ideas around the project. https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net/docs/intro

(I'm also available to answer questions in between slinging pizza)

Deps?

Hokusai pocket currently uses

* libuv for offloading cpu intensive tasks to a worker pool to prevent blocking the UI thread, and I plan to integrate some libuv networking as well.

* raylib for backend graphics / I've also built with SDL on arm64 to run applications on my pinephone

* NativeFileDialog for the lovely integration into filesystem.

* MRuby for running or embedding the scripts

* tree-sitter for the custom template grammar (Although templates can be built with ruby)

Anyway, I hope you get a chance to try it. If you make something cool AND have docker installed, you can also publish your work as single binary

`hokusai-pocket publish:target=<your cool program.rb>`

Would love feedback, apps, and help with documentation and more build targets.

urs truly,

@ ᴗ @

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