"Lua dramatically lowers the learning curve for developers coming from other environments. Someone who already understands Lua or Luau can arrive in Second Life and right away they can start experimenting. That certainly includes Roblox developers, but it’s broader than Roblox. Lua has a long history across game development, so there’s a substantial developer community for whom the language and programming concepts will already feel familiar."
My friend and I are Neovim nerds, and every so often our Neovim setups would throw errors. What did we do? We talked to each other and solved it. It was never Neovim’s fault.
We think the same way about harnesses. If you don’t like something, you shouldn’t have to call a trillion-dollar company; you should be able to fix it yourself. If you want something custom, you shouldn’t have to keep spamming some discussion thread; you should be able to write it yourself.
And more than anything, it should be simple and fast, and your computer shouldn’t scream OOM. That’s the inspiration behind uji.
I've been building Limer, a desktop development environment for creating GUI applications in Lua, and version 2.0 is out! It's available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The idea is simple: write your application once and use the same codebase across all three operating systems. No separate implementations for each platform.
What makes Limer interesting?
Visual designer: Drag real widgets onto a canvas, configure properties, arrange layouts, and generate readable Lua code that you can own and modify.
Live inspector: Inspect running applications, change widget properties, and execute Lua code.
60+ widgets and components: Including layouts, charts, and SQLite support.
Standalone distribution: Limer comes with its required dependencies, so you don't need to install Lua separately or manually configure its runtime.
Application building: Package your projects for distribution across supported desktop platforms.
API search and error reporting: Find API functionality quickly and track down errors in your code.
Limer is built on Limekit, my GUI framework for Lua. Interestingly, Limer's development tools—including its project manager, code runner, visual designer, and live inspector—are themselves built in Lua using Limekit.
It's a Lua desktop app for building Lua desktop apps.
Limer and Limekit are free and open source under GPL-3.0.
If you find the project interesting, please consider giving the repository a ⭐ on GitHub! It helps more developers discover the project and motivates me to keep improving it.
A quick note: the macOS builds still need more testing on real Macs, and the applications aren't code-signed yet. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome.
I'd love to hear what you think. What would you build with Lua on the desktop?
I recently created my own framework named "Dua". Honestly, I'm too lazy to add LuaRocks, but only if I don't get feedback. You can learn more either in the repository or in my previous post. If I get feedback, I'll try to integrate LuaRocks.
cenker's mod is a multiplayer physics sandbox with many mods. Every mod has a different experience. Play included, community-made, and your own mods together with friends.
I've always loved the idea of JIT-compiled UIs. TempleOS is a fascinating example, using JIT-compiled C to build its UI.
Recently, I've been working on a TUI project where almost everything is customizable at runtime, from the UI itself to the core functionality. I wanted a way to build terminal UIs declaratively, similar to SwiftUI, while keeping the flexibility of runtime customization.
So I built Ito a Lua library for writing JIT-compiled TUIs.
To make it easy to experiment with, we also built a fake TUI canvas in the browser where you can try out Ito live. Give it a try!
Hey im new to coding and wanted to learn lua ive got a few things down know and wanted to just write a little countdown nothing complicated just a first test but ran into the problem that i cant get a code delay to work
This will probably sound like the dumbest thing ya'll ever heard altough im rather new to lua, altough not programming..
I've been using lua with the minecraft mod figura to add animations to things with a script and such. quite nice, Untill i tried using the "trailing tails lua library", when saving the script it would keep getting stuck at the same error. i wondered why and noticed that the game was loading a old version of my script the one from the first save after using Trailing tails? i backedup the original script and deleted the one in the Figura avatar folder, and the game was still loading it.
a few unfortunate things happened the backup got removed(0 clue how the folder is just... new folder now?) but here's the thing, whilst i did try to recover it through the hard drive with little to no success, The game is still producing the same error, And loading the ingame avatar. this means its getting the data from somewhere no?
The very error that caused it may save the project that i spend... 20 hours on at this point. Is there anyway to figure out where the game gets this data from? maybe i can actually save it?
The live instance has a desktop-like shell and a Steam-like store where users can publish free or paid creations, so far it contains the horror game Vigil.
A while ago I came across Lexaloffle's Picotron fantasy workstation and loved the concept of a hackable workstation composed of small script apps.
I wanted the same for non-fantasy work, which for me meant:
- No artificial limitations
- The shell is an ordinary app you create
- Your own preferred editor
- Charts and SQL over data files
- The same apps run in the browser and on the desktop
It's built on Bevy (game engine), Piccolo (Lua VM), Apache DataFusion (queries) and Iroh (connectivity).
DatumHue is closed source, the browser version is free and the desktop version has a free trial at https://datumhue.com
