Re: Cursed GTK port actually usable

[Pavel Machek <pavel suse cz>]

Hi!

> > 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.

? From days of Borland's turbo vision, good text mode UIs are
very similar to graphical UIs. Movable windows, pull
down menus, mouse, colors. I believe turbo vision is still the best
text UI around. Now... how is it different from gtk+?

* keyboard navigation is more important (but that's okay,
as we want apps to be accessible, anyway)
* icons are not possible
* toolbars  are less important (altrough bottom line of mc
is good example of usefull text-mode toolbar)


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

Why? It has glade to help you with application design, and
if you are using internationalization, you'd need layout engine, too.
Graphics-manipulation parts of gtk are no longer important, but
I guess thats okay... 

> 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.

I do not think that group is so small; currently popular applications
tend to have their less-powerfull text-mode variants. I believe that's waste of
effort. (kmail/mutt, mozilla/links, yast-graphical/yast-textmode, stormpkg/dselect
 gnobots2/robots, krusader/mc),
and sometimes you wish you could run some app in text mode (system
managment applets would be very welcome, for example).

				Pavel
-- 
				Pavel
Written on sharp zaurus, because my Velo1 broke. If you have Velo you don't need...