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

But?

[Anonymous Coward]

How I'm supposed to run gimp with this thing?

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.

Re:But?

[Wolfrider]

--Ever heard of aalib?

april fools?

[DarkAurora]

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

Re:april fools?

[Turmio]

Actually yes there was: http://qtconsole.nl.linux.org/. Pretty amusing thing. I wonder if this wicked mind got inspiration from that joke.

Forgot

[brokencomputer]

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!

Wow.

[schon]

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!

Re:Wow.

[schon]

What is wrong with the GTK file selector dialog?

It's a pain in the ass to navigate between frequently used folders.

It supports tab completion. I don't know about you, but I like that I can traverse long directory with just a few keystrokes a few more , etc.

Yes, but for long directories that I use frequently, even "a few keystrokes" is too much. Try KDE3's file dialog - ONE mouse click takes me to my any of my most-used directories.

Tab completion is OK, but it assumes that I already have both hands on the keyboard - which (after using something like Gimp is a very, very bad assumption) Try editing 100+ photos, from a read-only folder, and save the resulting images in a different folder, nested 8 or 9 levels deep. It's needlessly time consuming with GTK.

The Windows file selector looks pretty, but that's about it

Who said anything about Windows?

Try KDE's file dialog. Get used to it - add some quicklinks. Then try to use GTK+, and you'll see how clunky it is.

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 :-)

Re:Okay but

[multi io]

GDK pixmaps

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...

Re:Okay but

[uhoreg]

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

GTK uses a container model for widget placements (i.e. you put the widgets in containers, and everything gets auto-sized based on the contents). The placement of widgets isn't pixel-based. So this isn't an issue, at least in properly written GTK programs.

Alright, I'm off to recompile X-Chat.

Cursed GTK uses LD_PRELOAD, so there's no recompilation needed. Unless the program is statically linked, of course.

Finally!

[phraktyl]

I won't have to bring up X to edit photos in the Gimp!

Re:Finally!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I won't have to bring up X to edit photos in the Gimp!

Even better : use a TTS with that and you've got gimp for the blind :

Tool-Eraser-Star-Transparency-Minus-Minus-Minus- Pl us-Minus-Minus-Minus-PipeSign-ColorRed-ColorRed-Co lorRed-ColorRed-ColorRed-ColorRed-ColorRed-ColorRe d...

A similar technology: 1986 WordPerfect on VAX/VMS

[unfortunateson]

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.

Charva does the same for Java

[llouver]

For a character base port of javax/swing...

see charva: http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/
screenshot: http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/images/cha rva1.png

Hello!

[Anonymous Coward]

1992 called, and they want their GUI back!

Because non CLI text interfaces are useful.

[hey!]

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.

Wonderful

[AntEater]

Now I can have a text mode file dialog that loses my default file name too.

Eye Candy

[femto]

Those screen shots actually look quite usable. (Well, no worse than the original versions of 'Turbo C'.)

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?

Re:Eye Candy

[swillden]

Or, maybe not all of the advances to UI tech is visual? There's much more to interfaces than what you see. The rules behind where you put things amd being able to exploit the objectiveness of widgets to create new ones are two of the most advanced ideas of ui technology in my opinion.

Google for TurboVision, the UI toolset Borland created in the process of building their text-based IDEs. One of the nicest, most object-oriented UI toolkits I've used... and a very nice tool for creating applications quickly. I think Borland released it as public domain, or under a permissive license, so you can find the source code on the net in quite a few places.

The complete C++ toolkit source is around 250KB, zipped.

Also, i18n, l10n, and section 508 concepts are making their way into interface design more and more, that's not necessarily a visual upgrade.

TurboVision had great support for internationalization as well. Granted, it was really only workable for languages that used a latin character set, but that was more of a platform limitation.

So, I'd say the other poster had it right: Most of the changes have been eye candy. Not that there's anything wrong with eye candy, I like my nice proportional, anti-aliased fonts and my pretty icons and rounded "lickable" controls, but, at bottom, the desktop metaphor hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

Re:Eye Candy

[starseeker]

TurboVision has apparently been somewhat modernized from the original source release. Here's the website:

http://tvision.sourceforge.net/

Re:Textmode GUIs not all that new

[samjam]

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

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.

Gnome Foot

[Enucite]

_
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or maybe something a little simpler, like:

G

You only think that's a joke.

[twitter]

I won't have to bring up X to edit photos in the Gimp! Even better : use a TTS with that and you've got gimp for the blind :

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!