go-flutter - A package that brings Flutter to the desktop
Purpose
Flutter allows you to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.
This unofficial project brings Flutter to the desktop through the power of Go and GLFW.
The flutter engine itself doesn't know how to deal with desktop platforms (eg handling mouse/keyboard input). Instead, it exposes an abstraction layer for whatever platform to implement. This project implements the Flutter's Embedding API using a single code base that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For rendering, GLFW fits the job because it provides the right abstractions over the OpenGL's Buffer/Mouse/Keyboard for each platform.
The choice of Golang comes from the fact that it has the same tooling on every platform. Plus Golang is a great language because it keeps everything simple and readable, which makes it easy to build cross-platform plugins.
Getting started
The best way to get started is to install hover, the official go-flutter tool to set up, build and run Flutter apps on the desktop, including hot-reload.
Read the hover tutorial to run your app on the desktop, or start with one of our example apps.
If you want more in-depth information about go-flutter, read the wiki.
Supported features
- Linux :penguin:
- MacOS :apple:
- Windows :checkered_flag:
- Hot Reload
- Plugin system
- BinaryMessageCodec, BinaryMessageChannel
- StandardMessageCodec, JSONMessageCodec
- StandardMethodCodec, MethodChannel
- Plugin detection for suppoted plugins
- Importable as Go library into custom projects
- UTF-8 Text input
- Clipboard copy & paste
- Window title and icon
- Standard keyboard shortcuts
- ctrl-c ctrl-v ctrl-x ctrl-a
- Home End shift-Home shift-End
- Left ctrl-Left ctrl-shift-Left
- Right ctrl-Right ctrl-shift-Right
- Backspace ctrl-Backspace Delete
- Mouse-over/hovering
- Mouse-buttons
- RawKeyboard events (through
RawKeyEventDataLinuxregardless of the platform) - Distribution format (windows-msi, mac-dmg, linux-appimage, and more)
- Cross-compiling using docker :whale:
Are you missing a feature? Open an issue!
Examples
A separate repository contains example Flutter apps that also run on the desktop. Go to github.com/go-flutter-desktop/examples to give them a try.
Plugins
Some popular plugins are already implemented over at github.com/go-flutter-desktop/plugins.
If you have implemented a plugin that you would like to share, feel free to open a PR on the plugins repository!
For a detailed tutorial on how to create a plugin, read the wiki.
Version compatibility
Flutter version
Flutter itself is a relatively young project. Its framework and engine are updated often. The go-flutter project tries to stay compatible with the beta channel of Flutter.
Go version
Updating Go is simple and Go seldomly has backwards-incompatible changes. This project remains compatible with the latest Go stable release.
GLFW version
This project uses go-gl/glfw for GLFW v3.2.