I got fed up of ImGUI when I wanted to route events to my application instead of the GUI. Its good "out the box" ut when you need to get down and dirty to customise, it can be awkward.
Nowadays I do a hybrid approach, so I have use NanoGUI and create my own "live data" "retained mode" controls. Now I have either the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. I think the best:
Pros:
- I don't have to bother with data binding. As the control is passed a pointer to the actual memory for he value, it can "go get it" when rendering, rather than my application setting its state.
- I still have classes to represent elements and state, so its conceptually simple to build controls on controls. I found this difficult with Imgui.
Cons:
- renders 100% full speed, but I am working on way to speed up and slow down render loop depending on user activity, so that when sitting idle, the cpu is not burning.
This is the exact issue I'm running into right now with dear ImGui. There is no event propagation. You can either transfer control over to ImGui, or you retain control. In Qt it would be possible for the focus widget to not accept events, so they would bubble up the hierarchy. Considering how the hierarchy is tied to the callstack, this seems difficult to achieve with an ImGui.
You seem to be missing the point of IM GUIs. They are just intended to render the UI in a stateless way. If you try to use them in another way you'll find them awkward, of course.
Nowadays I do a hybrid approach, so I have use NanoGUI and create my own "live data" "retained mode" controls. Now I have either the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. I think the best:
Pros: - I don't have to bother with data binding. As the control is passed a pointer to the actual memory for he value, it can "go get it" when rendering, rather than my application setting its state. - I still have classes to represent elements and state, so its conceptually simple to build controls on controls. I found this difficult with Imgui.
Cons: - renders 100% full speed, but I am working on way to speed up and slow down render loop depending on user activity, so that when sitting idle, the cpu is not burning.