Minui

Minui is a lightweight graphics library designed to provide a simple, framebuffer-based user interface for embedded and mobile environments. It originated within the Android ecosystem to support basic UI rendering in contexts where a full windowing system is unavailable, such as boot, recovery, and OTA update environments. The library emphasizes a small footprint and straightforward API, enabling developers to display images, text, and basic UI elements without requiring a complete graphics stack.

Architecturally, minui provides a minimal set of drawing primitives and utilities for rendering to a framebuffer. It typically includes facilities for opening and managing a framebuffer, drawing bitmaps or raw image data, rendering fonts, and presenting simple UI components like progress indicators and menus. Its focus is on reliability and speed in resource-constrained environments, often running as part of initramfs or recovery programs. Input handling, when needed, is kept lightweight to match the constrained use cases in which minui operates.

In practice, minui has been used to deliver visual feedback during device boot, system updates, and recovery operations. It is commonly associated with Android-based projects, where it has served as a common, minimal UI layer across various hardware platforms. The library has also been adopted or forked by custom ROMs and recovery projects seeking a compact, dependency-light interface for their user interfaces.

Overall, minui fills a niche for a simple, portable UI layer in environments lacking a full graphical stack. It provides essential capabilities to display status information, messages, and basic controls in a consistent way on devices with limited resources.