nested applications

[chris-kruining]

Hi,

I am making a digital dashboard and headunit/infotainment system for my car. and I would like to create a android-launcher-esc application that can ,well, launch other applications. but I don't just want to launch another app, I want to launch and show multiple. basically a really simple desktop.

For example, I want to show both my music player and my navigation.
My idea was to make both of these their own egui apps, so that I can properly isolate them.

My question / idea / feature request is; Can I render another app in my egui app?
I specifically say "another app" because I would to open up this project to allow any app that would run on linux to work.
What I had in mind is to launch other apps as child processes and somehow capture their output as a texture, then render this texture to a box, et voila! I still don't have the faintest clue how I would pass input to a child app, but one problem at a time.

Another way of putting it, I would like native iframes

Thanks!!!

[chris-kruining]

I have discussed this topic with someone who made a couple of suggestions:

• for nesting app made myself I could set up some "protocol" to pass framebuffers of nested apps to my main app.
• go low level and implement something like wayland

I love the second idea a lot, but that's a really deep rabbit hole.

What I think is the best solution for now, for my mvp, is to have my app expose widgets via lib.rs and use those in my main app.
a next iteration could always push to a more generic solution if provided necessary.

I would still love to hear other ideas and brainstorm some more!

[chris-kruining]

I just learned egui already does some stuff with wayland via egui-winit, is that a potential route for embedding applications in an egui app?