Shirei v0.6

Mobile Platform Support, widget customization, and more

2026.07.22

Today we announce the release of v0.6 of Shirei, the cross-platform Go GUI framework.

Featuring support for mobile platforms: you can now use Shirei to develop cross-platform mobile apps that work on both iOS and Android from the same Go codebase.

In the screenshot above, you can see an example mobile application: Hacker News Reader, along with a version of the Piano example running on an iPhone.

The Hacker News Reader uses the Firebase Hacker News API to fetch stories and comment threads.

The release comes with mobilerun, a dev utility to quickly run your application on a mobile phone (or a simulator) without confusing configurations or cryptic commands.

Naturally, this utility was programmed in Shirei itself.

We also ship a demo demos/mobile-camera that uses an extension to access phone camera and take a picture, which we also ship, under go.hasen.dev/shirei/ext/camera.

A new example desktop application has been added: git_history. Quickly browse your project's history and perform search through the commit log or the commit diff view. Very fast and responsive even on huge commits.

Quick summary of what's new in v0.6

• iOS/Android platform support (dev mode)
• Mechanism for platform extension development
• Some cascading of container attributes to direct children (recursively):
  • Size constraints along the cross-axis: max width cascades on columns, max height on rows.
  • Text styles are now container attributes and they cascade.
• Internal refactoring to allow measuring a view function without rendering it.
• Mechanism to allow customization of default widgets look and feel.

For a full list, see the CHANGELOG.

Below are examples from the demos of creating custom widgets:

Tutorials

In addition to the existing general tutorial, we have added:

• Layout Tutorial: A step-by-step tutorial to help you understand how the layout system works by building a chat app UI layout from scratch.

• Custom Widgets Tutorial: Building on the tutorial, we show how to customize the look and feel of the input box to look like a modern chat app compose field.

Docs

Here are some reference documents for setting up the development environment to support mobile app development.

• Running on Android
• Running on iOS
• Mobile extensions

Try it

See the small demo program on the landing page and try it. Browse the tutorials, try the example programs, e.g.

# Find-in-Files
go run go.hasen.dev/shirei/examples/haystack@v0.6.0


# Git log viewer
go run go.hasen.dev/shirei/examples/git_history@v0.6.0

GitHub stars help if you want the project noticed. Issues and feedback from real tools are welcome.

• Homepage: judi.systems/shirei
• GitHub: hasenj/go-shirei