Popups on Wayland

[ngortheone]

Popups on Wayland are rendered to a separate surface, which allows a popup to extend beyond the area of the main window. This is useful for creating applications like docks/panels - think of classic Windows "Start" button that shows a popup menu with installed programs. (and any other application that has small height)

A demonstration of popups on wayland:

recording.3.webm

It appears that with egui popups are rendered to the same surface as the main window ( at least this is how demo app behaves)

I am very new to egui, is it possible to do this with egui today? Would it be possible to add such functionality? (If not supported today)? I'd love to dive into the code and contribute this feature, please give me some pointers if possible

Thanks!

[ngortheone]

Popups in demo app on wayland today:

recording.4.webm

[coderedart]

egui doesn't have support for native popups. this requires native UI toolkit support (gtk/fltk etc..). As far as egui is concerned, there is just one giant rectangle (viewport) inside which it draws the ui.

[parasyte]

It is certainly true that as of today, the "single surface principle" is how egui operates. But I do believe it ought to be capable of creating and rasterizing to multiple surfaces, given the capability is exposed at a separate abstraction layer. An example of such a layer might be glazier, whose "Scope" includes this as it's number one bullet point:

• Window creation, including subwindows (useful for context menus and the like).

I don't believe it's contentious that this is a desired property to have. It just happens to be missing from the status quo.

I would also point out that this limitation is not restricted to Wayland, nor should any solution be constrained to Wayland. It is relevant across all platforms.

See also: #1176

[codecnotsupported]

I'd like to propose a suggestion, it would be possible to make the pup-op menu scroll-able.
Here's what it looks like in Obsidian (I think it works around the same limitation).

Scrollable.mp4