Choosing which crates to use

Confused by all the cuicui crates? Understandable, there is a lot of them, with very long names too!

Let’s split the task in two. Ask yourself two questions:

The following sections tell you which crate to use depending on the answer.

Layouting

All you want is some sort of layouting algorithm that you can keep in your head? Then use cuicui_layout without any other crates.

Interested in a ready-made UI library on top of bevy_ui? Then, use cuicui_layout_bevy_ui.
Want more flexibility? Using cuicui_layout on top of bevy_sprite will let you integrate your UI with a lot of 3rd party crates that only work with sprites. Then use cuicui_layout_bevy_sprite.
Using cuicui_layout with your own custom rendering system? Again, bare cuicui_layout is what you want.

Then you need to decide how to spawn full scenes or UI layouts.

Using the default bevy syntax, with nested cmds.insert(…).with_children(…)? No need to add any crate for this :P
Just want something a bit less verbose that the default syntax? Something very lightweight you can use in your rust code? Don’t mind recompiling the whole game for each UI touchups? Then use cuicui_dsl.
Want quick iteration times with hot reloading, an advanced scene file format with templating, basically an actual scripting language? Ready to sacrifice some compile time for this? Then use cuicui_chirp.

The cuicui_dsl page has a comparison matrix with cuicui_chirp to give you a more detailed idea.

Note that the cuicui_layout_bevy_ui and cuicui_layout_bevy_sprite crates have the chirp feature enabled by default. If you don’t care for it, then disable it with default-features = false.

Furthermore, the integration crates depend on cuicui_dsl unconditionally, as it is a very lightweight dependency.