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Qt For the Console

Posted by Unknown on from the x11-is-for-wimps dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Girish Ramakrishnan has written a Lighthouse plugin that lets one run Qt applications on the console. Old timers would recall the April Fool's story. Except it's for real this time." It's more of a neat hack than anything since it doesn't support things like mouse events yet.

19 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Fool me once ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Fool me once, shame on you.

    Fool me twice, shame on me.

    1. Re:Fool me once ... by E+IS+mC(Square) · · Score: 2

      You said it wrong.

      Correct version:
      "Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

    2. Re:Fool me once ... by hal2814 · · Score: 1

      Pretty good Jim Morrison impression there. I hope those guys have a good sense of humor and don't take us into court.

    3. Re:Fool me once ... by beelsebob · · Score: 1

      You've got arrays of independent drives?

  2. Slashdotted by RavenChild · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a video from the website showing tile animations.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJyF99uqSbY

    And here's the code:
    https://qt.gitorious.org/~girish/qt/caca-lighthouse

  3. April Fools by hedwards · · Score: 1

    Clearly this April Fools joke was botched be slashdot's failure to be nearly 10 months behind.

    1. Re:April Fools by scorp1us · · Score: 1

      Actually it is for real. The Light House project is Qt's magnum opus of platform independence. It is how Qt can target Android, iPhone and desktop in one fell swoop. Really, all this needs is a QPainter that maps to colors and ASCII.

      I think Qt is the most underrated technology out there. Probably because it is C++, and not many people care to use C++ these days.

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    2. Re:April Fools by KiloByte · · Score: 1

      Except, GTK had this for ages already.

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  4. Re:Deja Vu! by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

    Interesting, related story from about the same era: Visual Basic 1 was released by Microsoft as a way of migrating customers from QBasic-based solutions towards true Windows VB. It used the DOS-437 character set to provide a rather fetching mouse-driven console-based GUI, but could also run pure QBasic programs. Its code was also forward-compatible with VB2 and later.

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  5. Pah, GTK+ did it first. by ThoughtMonster · · Score: 1

    With Cursed GTK. Archive.org doesn't seem to have the screenshots, so here's a screenshot found on a random site.

    1. Re:Pah, GTK+ did it first. by ThoughtMonster · · Score: 1

      Actually, here they are:

      1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

    2. Re:Pah, GTK+ did it first. by scorp1us · · Score: 1

      Completely different. What you are looking at in TFA is a graphical GUI rendered as text.
      What you are showing is a re-parsing of the dialogs into ncurses. You could do the same thing in Qt, you'd just need to instantiate your TUI from parsing the XML .ui files.

      And VBDOS did it first.

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    3. Re:Pah, GTK+ did it first. by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      True that, the Cursed GTK looks useful, and is what I expected.

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    4. Re:Pah, GTK+ did it first. by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      the qt thing in this article(the video) looks like it's just the thing pushed through aalib, which it pretty much seems to be. **The cool thing though is that now Qt renders to QImage in the main ui thread and hands it off to caca. Caca opens a X connection (or similar), converts the image into text, displays a window and handles events in another thread. With some refactoring and thanks to QMetaObject::invokeMethod, the threaded and non-threaded rendering are pretty much the same and can be switched using an environment variable (THREADED_CACA=1).**

      so for once, the gtk version is more useful.

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  6. What is Lighthouse? by inglorion_on_the_net · · Score: 2

    For those not in the know, which included me a few minutes ago, Lighthouse was apparently a research project aimed to make Qt easier to port to different graphics systems. Was, because it has now been integrated with Qt 4.8, according to the page at that link.

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  7. Re:Bad choice for a name... by petteyg359 · · Score: 1

    There are languages long gone, and there will likely be "new" languages in the future. Over an infinite period of time, every word in this post will mean shit at some point.

  8. Re:Qt is dead by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

    well it is baffling that nokia would buy trolltech, endorse it as the new API for Symbian and then provide no upgrade path to WP7. Porting lighthouse to MS' phone platform would seem a reasonable value-add if Elop's hands weren't tied.

  9. XBox or PS3? by keith_nt4 · · Score: 2

    Finally Qt on consoles. Doesn't which one though *scratches head*

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    1. Re:XBox or PS3? by DaVince21 · · Score: 1

      The console, ie. the terminal. You know, a text console that Linux provides by default if you don't install any form of X server.

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