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Core Scenic library

Core Scenic Library

Scenic is a client application library written directly on the
Elixir/Erlang/OTP stack. With it you can build applications that operate
identically across all supported operating systems, including MacOS, Ubuntu,
Nerves/Linux, and more.

Scenic is primarily aimed at fixed screen connected devices (IoT), but can also
be used to build portable applications.

See the getting started guide and the online documentation for more information. Other resources available are:

  • Introducing Scenic, a video from ElixirConf 2018, which introduces Scenic and the problems it strives to solve.

Warning Version 0.11 is a MAJOR upgrade!

There are numerous breaking changes. Please read the version 0.11 upgrade
guide
for details about how to upgrade your
application to 0.11.

Goals

  • Available: Scenic takes full advantage of OTP supervision trees to create
    applications that are fault-tolerant, self-healing, and highly available under
    adverse conditions.

  • Small and Fast: The only core dependencies are Erlang/OTP and OpenGL.

  • Self Contained: "Never trust a device if you don't know where it keeps its
    brain." The logic to run a device should be on the device and it should remain
    operational even if the service it talks to becomes unavailable.

  • Maintainable: Each device knows how to run itself. This lets teams focus
    on new products and only updating the old ones as the business needs.

  • Remotable: Scenic devices know how to run themselves, but can still be
    accessed remotely. Remote traffic attempts to be as small as possible so it
    can be used over the Internet, cellular modems, Bluetooth, etc. This is
    actively under development and coming soon.

  • Reusable: Collections of UI can be packaged up for reuse with, and across
    applications. I expect to see Hex packages of controls, graphs, and more
    available for Scenic applications.

  • Flexible: Scenic uses matrices similar to game development to position
    everything. This makes reuse, scale, positioning and more very flexible and
    simple.

  • Secure: Scenic is designed with an eye towards security. For now, the main
    effort is to keep it simple. No browser, Javascript, and other complexity
    presenting vulnerabilities. There will be much more to say about security
    later.

Non-Goals

  • Browser: Scenic is not a web browser. It is aimed at a fixed screen
    devices and certain types of windowed apps. It knows nothing about HTML.

  • 3D: Scenic is a 2D UI framework. It uses techniques from game development
    (such as transform matrices), but it does not support 3D drawing at this time.

  • Immediate Mode: In graphics speak, Scenic is a retained mode system. If
    you need immediate mode, then Scenic isn't for you. If you don't know what
    retained and immediate modes are, then you are probably just fine. For
    reference: HTML is a retained mode model.

Contributing

We appreciate any contribution to Scenic.

However, please understand that Scenic is still fairly new and as such, we'll be
keeping an extra-close eye on changes.

Check the Code of Conduct and Contributing
Guides
for more information. We usually keep a list of
features and bugs in the issue tracker.

The easiest way to contribute is to help fill out the documentation. Please see
the Contributing Guides first.

Languages

Elixir96.4%C3.4%Makefile0.1%Nix0.1%
Apache License 2.0
Created February 8, 2026
Updated February 8, 2026