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GTK+ TTY Port
An anonymous reader writes: "FootNotes is reporting about what might be the coolest thing since textmode Quake: a curses-based GTK-2.0 port called Cursed GTK. This not only makes it possible to give Gnome the look and feel of Contiki, but also brings many real opportunities, such as remote logins where X forwarding is not possible, or remote logins over very slow modem lines. Screenshots here, here, here and here! Patches for bugs are welcomed by the authors."
Remote logins in the absense of an X server have been possible forever. This novelty hack did not bring many real opportunities as the submitter claimed it did.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Back in the minicomputer days, WordPerfect corporation created a reasonable port of WP onto the VAX/VMS environment. It supported a number of terminals, many of which were text-only.
Mind you, this was in the days of DOS WordPerfect dominance, WPWin was relatively new.
But the coolest thing was graphics mode for non-graphics terminals. They abused the font download capabilities of the VT220-series terminals that were the standard for the day to create 'mosaics'. Decent pictures of bitmaps could be created. I could recognize B&W bitmaps pretty well. Lousy for pr0n, but good enough that a letter-writing system we set up had recognizable signatures.
Design for Use, not Construction!
For a character base port of javax/swing...
a rva1.png
see charva: http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/
screenshot: http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/images/ch
Judging from the screenshots, those just don't get rendered at all. Generally, the mapping algorithm to character cells seems to be quite smart though...
Well, for the hack value I suppose.
However, the utility of non-command oriented text interfaces is pretty well established. There is, of course, the venerable curses; pretty sophisticated non command text interfaces were the norm on MS-DOS in the pre-windows days. These often featured mouse input, which combined with text display is enough for a wide variety of applications. Don't know if this GTK supports mouse inputs. From the screenshots I'd guess not which somewhat limits its utility.
As an example of a non-command oriented text interface in common use today, look no farther than your BIOS setup program.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This looks like VNC that's been merged with screen. screen was a great text-based virtual login back in the day, and is still useful when latency is too high for VNC. However, it's still a pain to use. :)
With GTK++ TTY mode, you could have a virtual text-based desktop capable of controlling (via mouse) any thing you'd want without opening many virtual screens.
xchat already comes with a text-mode interface (`which xchat-text`). Now perhaps they'll give you crap for not knowing about that.
I second that, irssi is the cat's PJs. I know a bunch of people who switched from BitchX and haven't looked back. And you don't have to fiddle with your terminal program to make the startup logo look right.
It's in XP. Probably 2k as well.
Contiki has been ported to x86, so you could get it running under vmware or Virtual PC.
I am NaN
TurboVision has apparently been somewhat modernized from the original source release. Here's the website:
http://tvision.sourceforge.net/
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
--Ever heard of aalib?
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I agree that text-mode can be very handy in some circumstances, but I think that more research should be devoted to improve X. I was a mlview-dxpc supporter and now I use NX, that has superseded the old project (http://www.nomachine.com). I can run GNOME from home, connected to my computer at office through an old 28.8 pcmcia modem. Here are some statistics:
s ion.php).
The client for Windows includes an X server based on the Cygwin port of XFree86. It is slower than many commercial X servers for Win32 I tried in the past, but it's free and quite "standard".
1019 B/s average, 1966 B/s 5s, 1050 B/s 30s, 2954 B/s maximum.
NX Compression Summary
link: MODEM with protocol compression enabled.
images: 22097472 bytes (21580 KB) packed to 2431560 (2375 KB).
Images compression ratio is 9.088:1.
overall: 25101152 bytes (24513 KB) in, 448863 bytes (438 KB) out.
Overall NX server compression ratio is 55.922:1.
NX is a free client+commercial server. Server is very cheap, compared to Citrix and uses X-Window as underlying protocol. Server compresses the X traffic down to the client to an extent that you never thought it was possible. The compression and X stuff are GPL while some parts are closed source. I don't care much, as the alternative would be MS+Citrix. There is a document explaining how compression is working (http://www.nomachine.com/doc_NX-XProtocolCompres
It has the same miserable file selector dialog as the X11 version! Won't those monkeys ever realize what a barrier to adoption that thing is? It was behind the times they moment they wrote it.
Indeed. A new file selector is in the works. In the meantime, discover the nice tab-completion feature. While I certainly agree there is room for improvement and definitely wouldn't suggest the file selector to my grandmother, I save/open files faster with the GTK dialog than any other I've used.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Yes. You can even move the "windows" around the screen. But try it on console, not on a terminal emulator. It will start selecting text and not move it. But you can click on the widgets, as expected.
Just to clarify, do everything on the command line using the GPLed stuff, running a remote GUI session over a modem. It's only the GUI interface to this functionality which is non-free.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'