Modern UI for Minecraft — mVUS

This is an unofficial maintenance fork of Modern UI for Minecraft, dedicated to keeping it continuously usable across Minecraft minor/patch versions; the upstream project focuses more on stable/LTS releases.

Overview

Modern UI for Minecraft (also known as ModernUI-MC) is a Minecraft mod based on the ModernUI Framework (a cross-platform desktop UI framework for the JDK) and its extensions.

This project provides ModernUI boot/runtime integration in the Minecraft environment, enabling ModernUI-based applications to run natively inside Minecraft. It also provides a mod development API for Forge / NeoForge / Fabric, making it easier to build fully featured graphical user interfaces.

You can think of this project as a bridging/service layer (with Minecraft-specific improvements and extensions): applications (or partial UI fragments) developed with ModernUI can run independently, or run inside Minecraft through this mod, usually without requiring code changes. Other mods based on the vanilla GUI can also benefit from a stronger text system and a suite of UI tools.

If you are developing a mod with complex interactions and rich interfaces, it is recommended to use the ModernUI Framework directly as your development foundation (rather than treating ModernUI-MC merely as a runtime dependency). Of course, mixed UI is also possible: use ModernUI for some parts and keep the vanilla GUI for others (ModernUI-MC’s enhancements to vanilla can also be disabled as needed).

Highlights

Modern Text Engine (for vanilla and mods)

ModernUI-MC includes a powerful text layout and rendering system tailored for Minecraft. It allows Minecraft and mods that rely on the vanilla GUI system—without modifying their code— to enjoy more modern, more Unicode-friendly text rendering:

• Real-time preview and hot reload of TrueType/OpenType fonts
• More complete font fallback
• Anti-aliased text rendering and FreeType font hinting
• Improved SDF text rendering (2D/3D, supports batched rendering)
• Precise device-space font size calculation for native glyph rendering
• Built-in Google Noto Color Emoji (supports Unicode 16.0 emoji)
• Configurable bidirectional text (BiDi) heuristic algorithm
• Configurable text shadow and original font size
• Unicode line breaking + CSS line-break / word-break
• Fast, accurate, asynchronous text layout computation
• More memory-efficient glyph rectangle packing algorithm
• Uses real alpha mask textures (1 byte/pixel; vanilla uses 4 bpp)
• Extensive optimizations for GUI/sign text rendering (higher FPS, fewer allocations, lower GC pressure)
• Compatible with OptiFine, Sodium (Rubidium), Iris (Oculus), and many mods
• Compatible with Minecraft JSON font definitions (bitmap fonts, TTF fonts)

Experience and performance enhancements

This mod also provides a variety of practical features to improve performance and everyday experience, for example: