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."

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!

Re:Why go back to the CLI

[rsborg]

Why, except for a pathetic fetish for obsolete technology, would you want to use a text-based interface to your X-Server?

Perhaps for bandwidth preservation? Of course, then why use text-GUI if you've got CLI?

Re:Why go back to the CLI

[mattdm]

Here I go, feeding the trolls again.... Perhaps this brings many real opportunities, such as remote logins where X forwarding is not possible, or remote logins over very slow modem lines.

for all the non-believers

[spir0]

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 :)

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: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

Not useful without developers testing it

[romi]

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.

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:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong with the GTK file selector dialog??

I keep hearing this about the gtk file selector (along with the debian install procedure). In both cases I am totally surprised, because I can't understand why.

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. The widget sensibly accumulates the Selection outside of the entry box (unlike many Motif and Xaw apps that don't do this and become a damn pain). This means that you can get to the root directory or your directory with one character (/ or ~).

The Windows file selector looks pretty, but that's about it. It takes forever to get across one directory to the other. You have keyboard quick prefix navigation with the windows file selector, but nothing quite as efficient as tab completion.

People just say it sucks as if its suction is obvious for everyone to see. Maybe I am just dense. WTF is wrong with it?

Re:april fools?

[Bingo Foo]

It was one of only a few April Fool's jokes that took me in, too. It makes sense and has such obvious utility, there was very little "joke" about it except the fact that it was false. It would be as if AOL Time Warner announced that they are splitting off their AOL holdings and renaming themselves "Time Warner." Ha Ha, April Fool? No, it makes perfect sense, but it's just not true. I keep hoping that Trolltech will resurrect this idea for real, sort of like Perl and Parrot.

Re:bug reports?

[rusty0101]

In almost every case where I have seen this disclaimer, the reason is that the developers are often much more aware of the bugs people are running into than the person who gives it a try. It's on their "to be fixed" list, and they will get to it when they have the opportunity.

This is not expected to be used in a production environment yet, so they don't need a couple hundred people reporting to them that right clicking on the [V] indicator closes the window when the user expects it to bring up a menu.

One of the things they are looking for in this case is help! in actually fixing those things you happen to run across.

I am reasonably sure that when the code gets to a level that they feel is near production level, they will change how they want bugs to be reported. As it is, effectively a bit of technology demonstration code, they know it isn't perfect.

At the same time, considering that this code is at a very early stage of development, it is possibly one of the best places to start looking at developing code. Perhaps it is something as simple as providing the supporting code for a clock module that will show time in iTime. Or it could be improving the way that a scroll bar functions on a window. If you download the CVS tree, and see a routine flagged "this routine is to be developed in the future" and you happen to think that it is something you can do as a way of learning how to write software, then by all means, jump in.

If you don't develop the best possible solution, I don't think they are going to worry too much so long as it works, and doesn't introduce serious instabilaty or security problems with the program. You may also get valuable feedback from the project lead as to what you need to improve.

Then again, perhaps that's too much work and you should just go to using safe, vetted software.

-Rusty

Semi-Off-topic question

[Quass]

Hey... I've never really heard of this aalib stuff before, and I followed a bunch of links to a site for MPlayer, and it was playing DVD's in ascii...

Is there any players for win32 that will play using the aalib codec?? I would love to see this in action, but don't have linux installed on my laptop!

Help??

Re:GNOME Armageddon

[usotsuki]

Don't like the direction? Fork it!

-uso.
Or, if you don't want to do anything but gripe, Fork You!

Re:Eye Candy

[zsau]

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?

No, that's more or less right. Back in the 80s there were more advanced user interfaces than today. It's quite a pity Microsoft and Macintosh had to win out.

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!

Re:well,

[Rysc]

The GTK file dialog is bad for several reasons.

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 /tmp would not go amiss.

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.

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.