How can I grab the Node editor (i.e. the one used for compositing) and define my own elements for a totally different project? I’m just looking for the nifty graphics and interface, and wish to program the functionality myself.
I tried googling to no avail.
I don’t think this sort of problem is not the sort of problem you can google. I would expect it to take a lot of ton of work to separate the node editor from Blender, or at least it would be a very involved project. I don’t know enough about it to offer much advice, that’s just my intuition.
Keep in mind that Blender uses the GPL license so you would have to be willing to distribute the source code of your project too.
There was work at some point to separate the ui framework from Blender itself, haven’t heard of it in a while. Can’t remember who worked on that, and it has evolved so much since, it’s probably incomplete unless the author kept up with the upstream changes.
While it’s near impossible to separate out the ui stuff from the rest of blender, it is however possible to make a complete custom node editor inside blender, in the text editor, see the 'Templates->Python->Custom nodes` template for an example of this.
If you want a fast UI framework to build a ppersonal project from, I would recommend DearIMGUI, by Omar Cornut. It’s used all over the place andis lightweight and pretty flexible, so you could use it to make your own nodeeditor I think:
I’d recommend something like Qt. It offers many flexible tools for GUI programming, event-handling and many more. Take a look at Graphics View Framework. It has tons of examples. LGPLv3 licensed. For python folks – PySide2 (LGPLv3) 