MenuKit

UI library for Fabric mods. HUD panels, widgets, layouts, modal panels on vanilla menus, region anchoring, click-through prohibition, recipe-book awareness — all client-only.

What it is

MenuKit is a Fabric-side UI library for mod authors. It provides primitives for putting UI on top of Minecraft:

HUD panels that overlay the game world (waypoint markers, status displays, debug overlays)
Decoration panels on vanilla menu screens (settings buttons next to the inventory, info displays on storage UIs)
Standalone screens built from MenuKit primitives instead of vanilla widget code
Region anchoring so panels position themselves relative to screen edges and other panels — multiple mods coexist without overlapping
Modal overlays with proper click-through prohibition
Recipe-book awareness so panels respect the player's recipe-book state

MenuKit is pure client-side. If you only need UI, depend on MenuKit alone. If you need custom container menus with slots, see MenuKit: Containers — the slot extension built on MenuKit.

Install

Add the Modrinth Maven repository and the MenuKit dependency to your build.gradle:

repositories { maven { url 'https://api.modrinth.com/maven' } } dependencies { modImplementation 'maven.modrinth:menukit:1.1.0' }

And declare the dependency in your src/main/resources/fabric.mod.json:

"depends": { "menukit": "*" }

That's it. MenuKit is client-only (environment: client), so its weight on your mod is zero on the server side.

Quickstart

A HUD panel

// In your ClientModInitializer public void onInitializeClient() { MKHudPanel.builder("coords") .anchor(MKHudAnchor.TOP_LEFT, 4, 4) .padding(4).autoSize() .style(PanelStyle.RAISED) .text(0, 0, () -> "X: " + (int) Minecraft.getInstance().player.getX()) .text(0, 12, () -> "Y: " + (int) Minecraft.getInstance().player.getY()) .build(); }

A decoration panel on a vanilla menu screen

// In your ClientModInitializer List<PanelElement> elements = List.of( new Button(0, 0, 50, 16, Component.literal("Settings"), btn -> openSettings())); Panel buttonPanel = new Panel( "myapp-settings-button", elements, /*visible=*/ true, PanelStyle.NONE, PanelPosition.BODY, /*toggleKey=*/ -1); new ScreenPanelAdapter(buttonPanel, MenuRegion.RIGHT_ALIGN_TOP, /*padding=*/ 0) .on(InventoryScreen.class, CreativeModeInventoryScreen.class);

The button appears in the upper-right of vanilla InventoryScreen and CreativeModeInventoryScreen. If another MenuKit-using mod also drops a panel in RIGHT_ALIGN_TOP, both stack vertically — no manual coordination required.

Feature highlights

Region anchoring system. Eight edge regions (LEFT/RIGHT × ALIGN_TOP/BOTTOM, TOP/BOTTOM × ALIGN_LEFT/RIGHT) plus CENTER. Panels stack in the region's flow direction. Multi-mod-friendly by design — deterministic stacking order across mods via alphabetical-by-modId with optional priority override.
Element library. Button, Toggle, Checkbox, Radio, RadioGroup, Icon, Divider, ItemDisplay, ProgressBar, Slider, TextField, TextLabel, Tooltip, ScrollContainer, Dropdown, DropdownMulti (multi-select).
Modal overlays. Proper click-through prohibition over vanilla menus. Modals respect Esc, focus traversal, and z-ordering.
Recipe-book awareness. Panels track the recipe-book panel's open/closed state so they don't fight for screen real estate.
Auto-wrap + auto-scroll. TextLabel.setWrapWidth() triggers automatic line wrapping; ScrollContainer provides scrollable regions with mouse-wheel input; long text scrolls into view on overflow.
Control styling. Elements opt into MenuKit-styled or vanilla-matched looks — including vanilla-style pressed visuals — so your UI can blend in or stand apart.
Universal cursor capture. Compensates for vanilla teleporting the cursor to window center on screen transitions.
Stable, opinionated layout. Pinned-width / pinned-height stacking primitives keep panels predictable across resolutions.