Higher-level packages for menu, window, or general UI-management?

[EliaTarasoff]

I'm making a puzzle game with Ebiten, and it seems like it's at lower level of abstraction than I'd want, for doing the UI. Ebiten gives me all seem give me elementary things like mouse button clicks, or gamepad or keyboard presses, or drawing an image. However, I want to do larger things like this:

• Create a 'main' menu for the game, that shows text, maybe animates some things, and lets you select options.
• Keep track of multiple menus, including 'child' menus or having a 'modal' that's over top of other things. (And then disappears when it's finished.)
• Move a 'cursor' around the screen with key or gamepad button presses, that you can then use to select an option or cancel from something. (This is pretty typical of console games where there's no mouse. Like how the menus work in Mega Man, Mario, or even something recent on PC like Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, or Dungeons or Aether.)

My game's going to be pretty simple, so I don't mind writing this myself, but I was wondering if there's already some packages or libraries I could use instead. I couldn't find anything in the Ebiten docs, this roadmap discussion, looking in its source, or in the issues or discussions here, and googling for things like "Golang UI manager" gives a lot of things that are either dead software projects, or at the wrong level of abstraction. For example, GTK, linked from this big list of Go libraries, seems to be in the same role as Ebiten - it owns the main window, runs the application, hands you input events to deal with, and takes care of rendering everyhing to the screen. Even if there's some sub-component of a Golang GTK wrapper that I could use just to do the 'logical' stuff, and hook it up to Ebiten's input events and rendering calls, it's an absolutely massive project, since it's made for making graphical programs that can run on different desktop operating systems, run on phones, etc. (So even finding smaller sub-components in the documentation is a daunting task. I gave up after half an hour. 😅)

Thanks in advance!

[EliaTarasoff]

(From Discord discussion) This other list seems better.

Tentatively, ebitenui seems like what I need, without being a giant library that gets in the way of other things...

[EliaTarasoff]

Ebitenui has a lot of default behavior that would get in the way of me making a keyboard- or gamepad-oriented game. For example, buttons get 'clicked' by a mouse, and recolor themselves when hovered, but my game will not have mouse support. (So if buttons recolor on hover, it sets up expectations that I can't fulfill.) For now I'm going to just write this by hand, since I'll have a very limited UI, like old NES games.