Module upstream 

GPUI and GPUI Community Edition

GPUI Community Edition is a fork of the GPUI that lives in the Zed repository. Zed’s GPUI is developed for Zed; GPUI-CE maintains that foundation for standalone applications and adds its own APIs, and general improvements to foundational use-cases, like color, or text.

We share the entity, context, and element model, but dependency names, text behavior, and available features can differ, so we’re not exactly a drop-in.

Porting code from Zed’s GPUI

Start by renaming the dependencies, then check every API and text measurement your application relies on. A port is compatible only for the revisions and enabled features you actually compare.

Depend on the GPUI-CE packages. The main crate is published as gpui-ce. Rename it in Cargo.toml, so your use gpui::... lines keep working:

[dependencies]
gpui = { package = "gpui-ce", version = "0.2" }
gpui_platform = { package = "gpui_ce_platform", version = "0.1" }

The versions above select the latest compatible published releases, while this documentation may include APIs from the repository’s next release. If an example does not exist in the version you use, switch both dependencies to the same git revision as shown in Start a project, or adapt the example to the published API.

The other GPUI crates are published as gpui_ce_*: gpui_ce_platform, gpui_ce_elements, gpui_ce_tokio and so on. Rename them the same way.

Start the app through gpui_platform. gpui_platform::application() creates an Application for whichever platform you build for, including the web.

Expect text to lay out slightly differently. GPUI-CE lays out text with Parley on every platform, rather than with each platform’s text system. Shaping, fallback, and line breaks can differ from the upstream backend; avoid assuming a fixed pixel difference. Check text measurements and wrapping with the fonts your app ships. The text guide covers these settings.

Use the trait methods for notifying and emitting. notify and emit are methods of the AppContext trait. Import use gpui::prelude::* to bring the trait into scope; async contexts return a fallible result when updating state. Contexts explains those access and lifetime differences.

What GPUI-CE adds

The web. GPUI-CE runs in browsers through WebAssembly. Auto tries WebGPU and falls back to WebGL2; forcing a backend fails if that backend cannot initialize. See Run on the web.

Text. Parley-based layout everywhere, with bidirectional text and right-to-left layout (Styled::rtl), letter spacing, text transforms, and variable font widths (FontWidth).

Editable text. The gpui_ce_elements crate provides single- and multi-line text fields, with selection, undo, the clipboard and input methods. See Accept text input.

Motion. Animations with iterations and alternating passes, and transitions of style properties such as a hover color (InteractiveElement::transitions). See Animate.

Styling. Smoothed (“squircle”) corners (Styled::rounded_smoothing), gradients on borders and shadows, and transparent or blurred window backgrounds on each desktop platform.

Input. Touch gestures integrate with pointer dispatch, including clicks, scrolling, and pinches. GPUI-CE also provides character palettes on Linux and Windows, extending the existing macOS support. See mouse and touch input.

Accessibility. APIs for performing assistive-technology actions and inspecting the accessibility tree. The accessibility guide shows how to expose controls and test their semantics.

Tooling. Hot patching of render code into a running app (the hot-patching feature; see Reload code while the app runs), a wgpu renderer for macOS (macos-wgpu on gpui_platform), and an API for drawing into windows with your own wgpu code (custom-gpu).

Applications. Haptic feedback on macOS trackpads, the macOS activation policy, hiding and showing windows at run time, and detecting a lost GPU device.

Keeping up with upstream

GPUI-CE merges Zed’s GPUI changes with the tooling in scripts/sync-upstream in the repository, and keeps its crates at the same paths as upstream so that changes apply cleanly. If you find an upstream fix missing, or want to contribute a GPUI-CE feature back, open an issue on GitHub.