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."

Comments

april fools?

[DarkAurora]

Wasn't a similar thing with Qt an April fools joke a few months back?

Okay but

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I realize this is all about geekiness factor, but how do they handle these :

- Widget alignments when whatever widgets you align don't fall exactly on their equivalent ascii places?

- GDK pixmaps : do they use AAlib to render them?

Alright, I'm off to recompile X-Chat. If it actually turns out good in ascii, nobody will be able to give me crap on IRC because I don't use 1337 BitchX :-)

Turbo Pascal

[khrtt]

The screenshots look awful like the good old Turbo Pascal (circa 1990 or so) text-mode GUI library. Which was a fine library, at least IMHO. However, does the word, ahem, "creative" mean anything anymore?

Shameless Plug

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

Ooh, more TTY stuff. I love stuff that runs on a TTY. aalib rocks. I have mplayer set up for movies, I have the original port for Quake 1... I run links for webbrowsing. I use centericq for my chat.

Even better, I wrote aavga2 to run Quake2 on aalib!

Now that Gtk+ is moving to TTY as well, maybe I can get rid of X entirely? *grin*

Re:Why go back to the CLI

[zakezuke]

Why, except for a pathetic fetish for obsolete technology, would you want to use a text-based interface to your X-Server?

If you are stuck with 56k, I can see this being very handy, very very handy! While yes we have faster then dialup connections, they are not all available from everywhere. Also, if you are with an ISP that bills based on byte use, I can see this as being most excelent.

Also... if you are stuck in the Windows world, Xservers can be damn costly. Starnet for example charges $245 for their X-server. I assume since it can operate via TTY that it can also operate via ssh/telnet.

Lastly, the more complex you make the plumbing, the easier it is to stuff up the drain. One thing nice about pathetic obsolete terminals is the fact that they work, they always work. The server may go down, but you know full well that ye' old terminal isn't very likely to fail. They don't need upgrades, patches, and in them selves can't get a worm/virus.

very cool

[Atilla]

this is very handy, alhough I wonder how well it scales beyond 25x80...

this could also be very useful as a standalone X-less toolkit (a la Qt Embedded). RedHat (and some other distros) could really use a cleaner console widget toolkit... The one they use now (for system tools, etc) works like crap.

OTOH, I wonder what kind of resources it uses.

hmmm might have to try this out.

Re:But?

[DashEvil]

Yeah, that's a really good question, actually. Not just for GIMP though, but how HARD is it to compile any GTK2 app with this? I'm very interested in it. A lot of the trolls are sitting here bashing it as useless, but they don't realize the fundamental power that comes with flexability; the ability to use any GTK2 program ( which is a lot ) at the console through ssh is a great benefit.

TurboVision

[AT]

It was called TurboVision. A user-maintained fork still exists and has been ported to various platforms and compilers including gcc and Linux.

Its key difference from the text-based GTK+ is that it was a text-based library only. There was no graphical implementation of the same API.

Perspective and help.

[twitter]

I do lots of photo work on my machines and free software kicks ass. The problems you have is the use of the wrong tool for the job. The GTK open file dialog is made for simple file retrieval. What you are doing is batch work. Getting around that problem is easy. You describe your beef this way:

It has no method to quickly navigate directories. Depending on what I'm editing (print-quality photos, web graphics, the family album, etc) I'd like to quickly switch between directories. Now, what happens: I load Gimp, open the file dialog, navigate to my images directory (slow, even with command-completion), then load the image. After editing, I want to save the resulting image to another folder, so I then go back to the file dialoge, and do the same damn thing again.

First, use multiple instances of your programs and real file browsers to drag and drop. This is the easiest step of all. Run multiple coppies of GIMP, each from a shell in the directory you want to work. This way, the dialog box will be defaulted to where you want to be. Next, use the drag and drop capabilities of GMC, Nautulis or KDE's file browser. If you try to use bookmarks, you will quickly be overwhelmed by too many of them. Depending on what window manager you are using, one or more of these should work. SSH X11 forwarding currenly works to move clipboard contents accross different computers on a network, I'll bet it can or will soon be able to drag and drop files the same way. How's that for spanning directories fast? Use multiple file viewers, of course, for place keeping as well as multiple versions spawns of GIMP.

Next, try more appropriate programs for viewing and batch manipulation. Eye of Gnome and Gqview are excellent programs for viewing and moving multiple files. For batch manipulation, use Image Magic's convert utility. It's a front end to lower level utilities that resample, rotate, convert file types and more. "man convert" is informative and contains examples of usefull stuff. Use igal to make quicky web pages. Between that and a simple shell script to feed multiple directories, your days of waiting for dialogs are over. You won't get around the time your computer takes to manipulate the images, but you will save loads of clicky clicky GIMP time.

Right rotates are a typical example. I use gqview to select and move all picutes that need to be rotated right and left to seperate directories. The CTRL key selections also work in gqview's thumbnail screen. Selecting them is as easy as looking hoding the ctrl key and a mouse button. Moving them is as eay as right clicking the mouse, selecting "move" from the pulldown menu and creating the new directory withing the directory you are in. You did remember to start gqview from a shell in the directory with pictures to manipulate? That way the right directory will always be the default. Next I run the following script to rotate all those pictures:

count=1
while [ -n "$*" ]
do
convert -rotate 90 $1 $1
shift
count=`expr $count + 1`
done

I named it "rr" issuing ~/home/me/bin/rr dir_1 dir_2 dir_3 does the directories. Other common convert commands can be substituted for each and every batch job you may have.

A similar script can be used to call igal for many directories and thus generate thumbnails, an index and an html page for eveery photo in every directory listed.

Happy editing and don't try the above in windoze!