.. _introduction:

============ Introduction

LVGL (Light and Versatile Graphics Library) is a free and open-source C graphics library providing everything you need to create an embedded GUI with easy-to-use graphical elements, beautiful visual effects, and a low memory footprint.

LVGL provides the "GUI engine" that handles all end-user interaction with your application, including not only drawing the contents of the display and accepting user input and turning it into events "catchable" by the application, but also providing 30+ built-in widgets, 100+ style properties, scrolling, animations, advanced software rendering, built-in GPU support from MCUs to OpenGL, and much more. The combination of these enable you to efficiently develop UIs without having to re-invent the wheel.

Using LVGL in a firmware project effectively reduces the GUI-developer's job to defining the GUI and furnishing it with appropriate event hooks to carry out the valuable work of the GUI.

LVGL can use GUIs that are 100% defined in C code you write (for which any updates to the GUI require modifying that C code and re-flashing the firmware), or GUI definitions provided in XML files (for which updates to the GUI require only modifying the XML files that define the GUI for that firmware), or any combination of these two that suits your project.

.. _key_features:

Key Features

Powerful building blocks such as :ref:buttons, charts, lists, sliders, images <widgets>, etc.
Advanced graphics with animations, anti-aliasing, opacity, smooth scrolling
Various input devices such as touchpad, mouse, keyboard, encoder, etc.
Multi-language support with UTF-8 encoding
Multi-display support, even with mixed color formats
Fully customizable graphic elements with CSS-like styles
Hardware independent: use with any microcontroller or display
Scalable: able to operate with little memory (64 kB Flash, 16 kB RAM)
:ref:OS <threading>, external memory and :ref:GPU <draw> are supported but not required
Single frame buffer operation even with advanced graphic effects
Written in C for maximal compatibility (C++ compatible)
:ref:Simulator <simulator> to start embedded GUI design on a PC without embedded hardware
User code developed under simulator can be shared with firmware to make UI development more efficient.
Binding to :ref:MicroPython
Tutorials, examples, themes for rapid GUI design
Documentation is available online
Free and open-source under MIT license
Free for commercial projects

.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2

requirements
license
faq
repo