Re: Cursed GTK port actually usable

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 07:34, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Cursed GTK port was is now in usable state. (Actually, my old code was
> deleted and Cursed GTK was written by Johanka (and person who asked
> not to be named, IIRC, he's Bcc-ed and knows how to announce
> himself)). Project is at http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/,
> including screenshots.
> 
> It is in state where it is usefull for applications wanting to run in
> both X and console; if you are only slightly carefull about your
> application design, it works okay. [There's mc-style application being
> written, which should work on both console and X; cursed GTK is going
> to be the layer responsible for console].
> 
> If you run it on randomly selected gtk2 application, it does not quite
> work yet. (testgtk works okay, through).
> 
> It has three basic components:
> * gdk/cursed, forked from linux-fb
> * new theme
> * removing ugly +1's etc to make it render correctly
> 
> And now... Of course I'd like to see it merged. Merging gdk/cursed is
> easy, theme can live externally as well, but I guess those +1's are
> going to cause some problems.
> 
> Johanka, can you post diff between your and plain gtk, all but
> gdk/cursed?
> 
> Owen, this CursedGTK is actually usefull these days; would you
> reconsider your "No."?

I still don't think it makes sense. 

 - Good text mode GUIs and good pixel-based UIs have to be written
   separately. The necessary interaction design is very different.

 - If you are going to write a text mode UI, GTK+ is a huge, 
   bloated and fundementally unsuitable interface. 

I think adding a Curses backend would be useful to a very small 
group of people and would distract significantly from the goal of GTK+ -
to be the best possible toolkit for writing graphical mode 
applications.

Regards,
						Owen