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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."
How I'm supposed to run gimp with this thing?
Wasn't a similar thing with Qt an April fools joke a few months back?
You forgot to mention how great this will be for slow computers with low ram. I can't wait to try this out on my P1!
The Television Wiki
Wow.
Here I was thinking that it was utterly impossible to make the GTK file dialogue worse than it already was.
Zemljanka, I bow before you in humility!
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
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I won't have to bring up X to edit photos in the Gimp!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
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?
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*
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
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
1992 called, and they want their GUI back!
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.
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.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Now I can have a text mode file dialog that loses my default file name too.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
this will make system maintenance across ssh so much easier for chumps who don't know how to use CLI commands.
:)
hell, even I'd use it
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
It's interesting that once the flashy grapics is stripped away, today's user interface looks (and functions?) basically the same as yesterdays. Perhaps much of what we call 'advances in user interface' is just eye candy, or am I being deceived by appearances?
What is cool here is NOT the text mode as such, but that programs tht were written for graphical GTK are running fine with the text gtk libs!
NOT as the original developers intended, but works none-the-less.
THAT is cool.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
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.
--- sig moved for great justice.
This isn't going to be of much use unless app developers of common gtk apps actually test it - it may work fine for the Gtk demo app but (speaking from experience as a developer at a mid-size company that ships a GTK UI) real GTK apps often abuse GTK to get around window manager incompatibilities, resize and widget placement restrictions, etc., and developers, OSS or otherwise, aren't going to verify that their crazy hacks actually work on the TTY port. This is exactly why the Windows GTK port sucks in real life even though in theory it should work just like GTK on X.
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.
_ /
OOO( )
O ---,
(
\ L/)
---
or maybe something a little simpler, like:
G
Considering the fact that the interface is all text, TTS would be nice for blind people. On X start up, depending on what XDM is used, you would get something like, "My box, login, name, password, Using every normal program, email client (Balsa), web browser (Galleon) would all be much easier, especially with tool tips enabled. Compare that to Microsoft's Accesability options! Rock on GNOME!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The GTK file dialog is bad for several reasons.
/tmp would not go amiss.
Number one, shortcut navigation buttons do not exist. Typing ~/ only might take me to my home directory, it also might select the current directory (this seems to vary). A button would go a long way. An extra button for
A related problem is that the "location" pulldown does not allow typing. I must type full paths rather than modifying existing ones. Yes I could use relative paths in the input box, but this is hardly intuitive for the majority and often not convenient.
While I'm at it, there's no guarantee of a way to create a new directory while browsing with a GTK dialog. I don't care how it's done, but this is a useful feature. Some GTK file dialogs have it... some just don't.
The text-labeled buttons you describe are ugly.
I cannot view file size or meta information inline. It's annoying to pop up a terminal for this purpose.
Most of the time the file dialog is not resizable, confining me to a tiny viewable area.
I cannot sort the viewable area by different things. I can only sometimes successfully use shell-style patterns to liit the file listing.
It might be nice if I could drag and drop files to move them into subdirecories.
These problems should all be solved at the toolkit level. Some GNOME developers have said that they are waiting for a toolkit solution.
A lot about the GTK dialogs makes sense, like tab completion (even though this technically breaks a function that is considered "normal" throughout the windows/macintosh (and now KDE) worlds). You just can't call it good. It's passably functional at best.
I want my Cowboyneal
Yeah, but can I get font antialiasing with that? :)
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 $count + 1`
done
I named it "rr" issuing ~/home/me/bin/rr dir_1 dir_2 dir_3 does the directories. Other common convert commands can be substituted for each and every batch job you may have.
A similar script can be used to call igal for many directories and thus generate thumbnails, an index and an html page for eveery photo in every directory listed.
Happy editing and don't try the above in windoze!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.