Scarpe Diem: Seize the Shoes

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Scarpe (Italian for “shoes”) is a modern reimplementation of Why The Lucky Stiff’s Shoes — the beloved Ruby GUI toolkit that made desktop app creation accessible to everyone.

Shoes.app do
  button "Click me!" do
    alert "Hello, Shoes!"
  end
end

That’s it. That’s a desktop app.

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Why Scarpe?

Shoes was magic. Write a few lines of Ruby, get a real desktop application. No frameworks, no build tools, no complexity. Just pure, joyful programming.

But old Shoes stopped working. Scarpe brings it back — built on modern Ruby and Webview, running on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Simple

Write desktop apps in pure Ruby. No ceremony, no boilerplate.

Beautiful

Elegant DSL for layouts, text, images, shapes, and animations.

Fun

Programming should be joyful. Scarpe keeps the whimsy alive.

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Quick Start

gem install scarpe

# Create hello.rb
echo 'Shoes.app { para "Hello, World!" }' > hello.rb

# Run it!
scarpe hello.rb

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A Taste of Scarpe

Shoes.app(title: "My App", width: 400, height: 300) do
  background "#f5f5f5"

  stack margin: 20 do
    title "Welcome!"
    para "Scarpe makes GUI programming simple."

    flow do
      button("Say Hello") { alert("Hello!") }
      button("Goodbye") { exit }
    end
  end
end

Stacks and flows for layout. Buttons and text with one line each. Blocks for callbacks. Ruby as it should be.

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Documentation

The Manual
Complete reference All Docs
Architecture & internals GitHub
Source & issues Discord
Community chat

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In Memory

Scarpe is developed in loving memory of Noah Gibbs, who believed in this project and whose thoughtful documentation lives on in every design decision.

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Made with Ruby and whimsy.

Scarpe is open source under the MIT license.