VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
41–50 of 145 posts
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#42Looks like a modern version of twin https://github.com/cosmos72/twin
Ha, you beat me by a minute :D I agree!
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#43I've been thinking about such text-based DE for custom Raspberry Pi nano based smartphone. Reason being, common mobile apps are not going to arrive for Linux and Nano is not powerful enough to run web browsers anyways; So why not a text-based DE or even just a console which enables basic communication features and Lynx for browsing?
It would be great if we could get some GPU juice from Pi for text rendering in such environment like how iTerm2 does on macOS.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#44This is amazing. Has there been anything like this before?
Oh yeah. I'm going to date myself here, but I was just going to say this reminds me a lot of Borland Turbo C++ way back in the day. They had this thing called Turbo Vision for building text UIs. It seemed super cool back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
It was super cool!!! I had so much fun emulating it drawing single and double line text borders, with shadows. Oh ASCII chart how I miss thee.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#45I love the lines connecting all the windows to a single point. Helps with the spatial relationships.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#46Is this running on top of Windows and just replaces the GUI?
Nope, I guess this is a Linux or at least platform-independent command line interface program.
You are probably confused by the powershell which seems to be available for multiple platforms nowadays, see https://aka.ms/pscore6
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#47This is amazing. Has there been anything like this before?
Windows 1.0, while having a framebuffer-based layout engine, clearly evolved from a pure TUI, and retains elements (title bars, scroll bars, etc.) whose drawing algorithm emulates a TUI within the framebuffer, by just drawing DOS-like lines or grids of box-drawing characters. In fact, it’s only window content that is arbitrarily graphical in Windows 1.0; if you only have DOS VMM windows open, you’re essentially seein…
Windows 1.0 didn't actually use box-drawing characters for any of this, of course. For example, the System menu in the top left corner of each window was three horizontal lines, just like a hamburger menu of today. Scrollbar buttons did not look like any box-drawing character.
The Maximize button in the top right did look like a box-drawing character, but that's really about the only resemblance I see.
(I developed a DOS GUI for email, Transend PC, in the early '80s that used box-drawing characters, and soon after started writing SQLWindows for Windows 1.0, so pretty familiar with both.)
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drawing text is the most expensive in a GUI.
That's only true for TrueType Fonts in graphical mode. In text-mode, characters are "drawn" by simply writing their ASCII code point into VRAM and writing another byte (two 4-bit values really) in an additional "attribute" buffer to set the foreground and background colour. Programmers can swap out the default character set to provide their own typeface and graphical characters for use as window borders, shadows, etc…
Come on. We had long past the ASCII only era.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, around 1990
1985. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView I had just started working at Gupta Technologies at the time, and for a short while we seriously considered developing for TopView instead of Windows.
Ashton-Tate did it with Framework in 1984.
Though my memory is that it goes back a few years earlier to Valdocs on CP/M machines, but I can’t find any pictures on the intarwebs.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#50This is amazing. Has there been anything like this before?
Oh yeah. I'm going to date myself here, but I was just going to say this reminds me a lot of Borland Turbo C++ way back in the day. They had this thing called Turbo Vision for building text UIs. It seemed super cool back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
It definitely was super cool. The windows had types, could be resized, had titles, dropdown menus, and form controls. The editor had syntax highlighting. And most importantly (at least for me at the time), there was a language reference included with the help system which had hyperlinking, so you could click through pages about the supported syntax and various topics, gleaning a wealth of information. All on DOS!