Cygnus

Cygnus is a creative suite (Photo, Video, Audio) developed in Rust using egui (via eframe) and wgpu.

Project status

App	Version
Photo	0.7.0
Video	0.1.0
Audio	0.1.0

Project structure

Cygnus/
├── apps/                     # User-facing applications
│   ├── photo/                # Photo editor (layers, tools, canvas)
│   ├── video/                # Video editor (foundations)
│   └── audio/                # Audio station (foundations)
├── engines/                  # PURE business engines (zero UI dependencies)
│   ├── photo-engine/         # Photo engine: layer tree, compositing, live filters,                             # hybrid history, GPU compute, project format, export
│   ├── video-engine/         # Video engine (upcoming)
│   └── audio-engine/         # Audio engine (upcoming)
├── core/                     # Shared foundation reused across apps
│   ├── datatypes/            # Shared types: nodes, sockets, parameters, Vec2
├── cygnus-ui/                # egui design system: theme/ (SOLE source of tokens),
│                             #   widgets/ (buttons, icons via CygnusIcon, reorderable
│                             #   list), panels/, viewport/ (pan/zoom), dialogs/
├── packages/                 # Reusable libraries (never depend on engines/apps)
│   ├── math-utils/           # Shared math: canonical affine `Transform2D`
│   │                         #   (canonical `Vec2` = datatypes)
│   ├── file-utils/           # I/O: drag & drop, file dialogs
│   └── preferences/          # Persistent preferences, hardware, keybindings
├── assets/fonts/             # Hanken Grotesk, Material Icons
├── flake.nix                 # NixOS dev environment (Vulkan, Wayland)
└── Cargo.toml                # Rust workspace

Architecture philosophy

• Strict modularity: business logic lives in engines/* and core/*, never in the apps. An app = interface + orchestration.
• Pure engines: photo-engine (layer tree, compositing, history) has no UI dependency and can later serve the video module (titles, image compositing).
• Shared style, per-app layouts: all widgets come from cygnus-ui (theme, CygnusIcon, generic panels/viewport/dialogs); each app owns its layout and its domain widgets in apps/*/src/ui/. cygnus-ui never references engine or app types.
• Non-blocking UI: the egui loop never blocks — heavy work (decode, export, compositing) runs on background threads and reports back over mpsc channels polled each frame.
• Layered dependencies: apps/* may depend on engines/*, core/*, and packages/*; engines/* may depend on core/* and non-UI packages/*. Packages never depend on engines or apps.
• State-only rendering: settings (opacity, transform, blend) never regenerate pixels — they apply at draw time. This invariant is what makes the UI feel instant.
• Rust + egui + wgpu: one codebase, native GPU rendering on all three platforms.

---

Building

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.89+ (2024 edition)
• System dependencies (Linux): pkg-config, vulkan-loader, libxkbcommon, wayland (+ libx11 for X11)

Linux (NixOS / Nix)

nix develop        # ready-to-use dev shell
cargo build --release -p photo

Linux (classic distros)

cargo build --release -p photo
./target/release/photo

Windows / macOS

cargo build --release -p photo

No special configuration: wgpu automatically selects DX12 (Windows) or Metal (macOS).

Running the other apps

cargo run -p video
cargo run -p audio

---

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome — this is a young project and every contribution counts, from bug fixes to the rendering engine.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide: development setup, architecture rules, code style and the pull-request checklist.

Quick summary:

1. Open an issue first for significant changes (architecture, new engines).
2. Respect modularity: business logic → engines/* / core/*, widgets → cygnus-ui, orchestration → apps/*.
3. Preserve the state-only rendering model — profile before optimizing.
4. Quality gate: cargo clippy --workspace clean, cargo fmt before every commit.
5. Short, descriptive commit messages prefixed by the app (photo: fix blend-mode offset jump).

AI-generated contributions are accepted but must be validated by a human.

License

Cygnus is free software licensed under the GNU GPL v3 — see the LICENSE file.

• You are free to use, study, modify and redistribute this software
• Any derivative version must remain open source under the same license (copyleft)
• Every source file starts with the standard GPL header

Cygnus — Suite créative professionnelle open source
Copyright (C) 2026 vabyz971

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

---

Built with Rust, egui and wgpu — for creators on Linux.