zed/crates/gpui
Cameron Mcloughlin 4d6a3c7e11
gpui: Application::inaccessible() (#57954)
Provide a way to prevent GPUI from creating AccessKit adapters, and
enable this in Zed.

This will allow us to test AccessKit support in Zed without rolling it
out more broadly, while we gain confidence in the implementation in
GPUI.

I've also added a log statement

## Motivation (i.e. a mini post-mortem about the #56065 panics)

Merging #56065 caused some nasty panics in nightly. This was caused by a
bug in the logic for selecting a focus node for a `TreeUpdate`.
AccessKit panics when an invalid `TreeUpdate` is provided.

My assumption was that, since Zed uses no a11y APIs, and also that
essentially 0 zed users would have AT apps running, that merging this PR
would have no effect on the behaviour of Zed itself. However, two issues
combined to cause the panics:
- It seems like many people (everyone?) on mac gets the activation
callback called by accesskit_macos. A quick search suggests this might
be due to password managers searching for password fields, but not sure
how true that is.
- The bug in question related to *forgetting to check* whether a node
used a11y APIs, so we *were* pushing non-empty `TreeUpdate`s

As a (probably temporary) defensive measure, I added a function to try
to detect the bad cases and fix them. But it would be lovely if this
could live in AccessKit itself, since it would mean we wouldn't have to
do the check twice (once in GPUI, once in AccessKit). This would also
help prevent drift when updating accesskit versions if new invariants
are added.

We also cannot protect against this with `catch_unwind`, since we use
`panic=abort`. So our only option unfortunately is to temporarily
disable AccessKit until we know our implementation is stable.

Release Notes:

- N/A or Added/Fixed/Improved ...
2026-05-28 13:36:24 +00:00
..
docs docs: Change render function's return type (#27229) 2025-03-20 22:48:22 -06:00
examples gpui: Accesskit support (#56065) 2026-05-27 18:17:59 +00:00
resources/windows Enable segment heap for Zed (#54538) 2026-04-22 16:58:55 -04:00
src gpui: Application::inaccessible() (#57954) 2026-05-28 13:36:24 +00:00
tests Use serde 1.0.221 instead of serde_derive hackery (#38137) 2025-09-14 14:01:04 +02:00
build.rs GPUI on the web (#50228) 2026-02-26 18:36:50 +01:00
Cargo.toml gpui: Accesskit support (#56065) 2026-05-27 18:17:59 +00:00
LICENSE-APACHE
README.md gpui: Accesskit support (#56065) 2026-05-27 18:17:59 +00:00

Welcome to GPUI!

GPUI is a hybrid immediate and retained mode, GPU accelerated, UI framework for Rust, designed to support a wide variety of applications.

Getting Started

GPUI is still in active development as we work on the Zed code editor, and is still pre-1.0. There will often be breaking changes between versions. You'll also need to use the latest version of stable Rust and be on macOS or Linux. Add the following to your Cargo.toml:

gpui = { version = "*" }

Everything in GPUI starts with an Application. You can create one with Application::new(), and kick off your application by passing a callback to Application::run(). Inside this callback, you can create a new window with App::open_window(), and register your first root view. See gpui.rs for a complete example.

Dependencies

GPUI has various system dependencies that it needs in order to work.

macOS

On macOS, GPUI uses Metal for rendering. In order to use Metal, you need to do the following:

  • Install Xcode from the macOS App Store, or from the Apple Developer website. Note this requires a developer account.

Ensure you launch Xcode after installing, and install the macOS components, which is the default option.

  • Install Xcode command line tools

    xcode-select --install
    
  • Ensure that the Xcode command line tools are using your newly installed copy of Xcode:

    sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
    

The Big Picture

GPUI offers three different registers depending on your needs:

  • State management and communication with Entity's. Whenever you need to store application state that communicates between different parts of your application, you'll want to use GPUI's entities. Entities are owned by GPUI and are only accessible through an owned smart pointer similar to an Rc. See the app::context module for more information.

  • High level, declarative UI with views. All UI in GPUI starts with a view. A view is simply an Entity that can be rendered, by implementing the Render trait. At the start of each frame, GPUI will call this render method on the root view of a given window. Views build a tree of elements, lay them out and style them with a tailwind-style API, and then give them to GPUI to turn into pixels. See the div element for an all purpose swiss-army knife of rendering.

  • Low level, imperative UI with Elements. Elements are the building blocks of UI in GPUI, and they provide a nice wrapper around an imperative API that provides as much flexibility and control as you need. Elements have total control over how they and their child elements are rendered and can be used for making efficient views into large lists, implement custom layouting for a code editor, and anything else you can think of. See the element module for more information.

Each of these registers has one or more corresponding contexts that can be accessed from all GPUI services. This context is your main interface to GPUI, and is used extensively throughout the framework.

Other Resources

In addition to the systems above, GPUI provides a range of smaller services that are useful for building complex applications:

  • Actions are user-defined structs that are used for converting keystrokes into logical operations in your UI. Use this for implementing keyboard shortcuts, such as cmd-q. See the action module for more information.

  • Platform services, such as quit the app or open a URL are available as methods on the app::App.

  • An async executor that is integrated with the platform's event loop. See the executor module for more information.,

  • The [gpui::test] macro provides a convenient way to write tests for your GPUI applications. Tests also have their own kind of context, a TestAppContext which provides ways of simulating common platform input. See app::test_context and test modules for more details.

Currently, the best way to learn about these APIs is to read the Zed source code or drop a question in the Zed Discord. We're working on improving the documentation, creating more examples, and will be publishing more guides to GPUI on our blog.