Questions about windows support

Thu Feb 23 15:03:46 PST 2012

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:34:24PM +0100, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thursday, 23 February 2012 at 21:17:35 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >Taking the idea of an in-terminal video player further, what about
> >a general escape sequence for "application-specific output"?
> 
> <html>.....

That gives you the funny situation where trying to edit a HTML file will
interpret the tags instead of displaying them. If your editor is unaware
of that, then you have the even funnier situation where editing a tag
(i.e. temporarily breaking HTML syntax) will cause it to come out as
text, and once you have a fully formed tag, then it magically gets
rendered again. A twisted form of WYSIWYG. :P

> seriously, once you take the in-terminal stuff too far, you
> have a beast of a program that does everything; you end up
> with something like a web browser or nested X server, and
> you've lose the original beauty of the terminal.

No, the idea is *not* to have the terminal do everything, but allow
other programs to do it.

> This is the path I started on, and ended up with what I called
> the D Windowing System - which is still on my todo list, but
> has been for a long time and will surely be for a long time
> more.

lol... I suppose.

> But, I started with a terminal that can optionally output
> images. Then wanted improved character display and figured
> if it does images, it can be a bitmap drawable.
> 
> Then wanted multiple channels... and at this point, you have
> a poor man's X.

True.

> Realizing this, I went full into it and shifted gears to a higher
> level X kind of thing, where you make an app based on widgets on
> a grid, which would work in text mode or graphical mode. But, I
> didn't get too far before work took over my time.

Actually, I've thought of that before. It's something I'd love to have.

The main complaint with writing a real X11 app is that *everything* is
graphical, so to do something as simple as print a string requires an
inordinate amount of code. You need to create a subwindow or
subdrawable, load a font (with all that living nightmare that font
resolution is), calculate font proportions, spacing, line wrapping, and
do all of the above in an event-based model. At the end of the day
you've reinvented a GUI toolkit with a text widget.

[...]
> But, on a terminal, I just don't think images are a fit there.  Might
> as well just make something like a gui image viewer app and keep a
> more traditional terminal.
> 
> Though, I'd prefer to be more like vga text mode than VT100 in terms
> of capabilities.

The way I see it, it's a sort of "VGA-enabled text mode" terminal, where
you can intermix graphics on what is basically a character grid. Not a
full-fledged windowing system embedded in xterm.

(I mean, with graphics capabilities the application *could* implement a
windowing system, but that's the app's problem, not the terminal's.)

T

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