I once built something like this. There’s a Perl library[1] that lets you control windows, dialogues, etc. My grasp on concepts like asynchronous programming, callbacks, process IO, etc. was nascent at best, so naturally this UI that I built was pretty terrible. I learned a ton though!
VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
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Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#82I came here expecting an article about my beloved Emacs ;)
Might as well dive all the way in: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
Stumpwm would probably be attractive as well, because Lisp. http://stumpwm.github.io/
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There's also a window claiming to be Windows' CMD. As I can't figure out how to enter text in any of these windows (I'm assuming it's disabled, otherwise CHAOS) I can't tell if it's just a vestigial window of if it's a true output. The topics on the Github repo list both Linux and Windows. The Readme calls itself "aka Monotty Desktop". That makes me think they may have written the code for the Mono runtime, so I'm ex…
Powershell. But Microsoft ported Powershell to run on UNIX/Linux, so ...
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#84Isn't it similar to the rio windowing system from Plan 9?.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#85I came here expecting an article about my beloved Emacs ;)
serious question about exwm, how do you deal with a broken .emacs, and what about when you hang emacs?
Same as any other WM (although I don't actually use exwm). Enable ssh for troubleshooting or use boot flags to boot to console.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#86The source code is just a file named "not ready yet". How is this open source?
Pretty sure that MIT doesn't mean that they have to put the code in a repo. Have you tried emailing them?
Edit: Presumably they plan to put the code in a repo, but it's not ready yet.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#87I once built something like this. There’s a Perl library[1] that lets you control windows, dialogues, etc. My grasp on concepts like asynchronous programming, callbacks, process IO, etc. was nascent at best, so naturally this UI that I built was pretty terrible. I learned a ton though! [1]: https://metacpan.org/pod/Curses::UI
Not just Perl. Curses is what most TUIs on *nix are built in. It's a C library with a few different implementations.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#88Related: The MGR Window System https://hack.org/mc/mgr/
“MGR provides each client window with: curses-like terminal control functions, graphics primitives such as line and circle drawing; facilities for manipulating bitmaps, fonts, icons, and pop-up menus; commands to reshape and position windows; and a message passing facility enabling client programs to rendezvous and exchange messages.”
Essentially, each window was a souped up ASCII terminal with extra escape sequences which implemented primitive graphics. It competed with X-Windows on low-end workstations during the 1980s.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742611
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#89The width of the display used in the screenshot appears to be less than 150 characters. Why would you add the clutter and distraction of transparent windows with frame decorations in such a limited environment? 30% of the real estate is consumed by elements that don't present any information to the user. On a modern display, this could far more productively be replaced with (1) any number of tiling WMs with console t…
The demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLumnSctakY&feature=youtu.be) reveals that this is not just a traditional window manager for a static screen, it's got a much larger virtual canvas that the display can scroll around in. So there's a LOT more space to make an aesthetic decision for big, character-wide window frames.
Seriously go watch the video, this thing feels like it's got a foot in the realm of UI roads not taken like Raskin's zoomable UI, text-mode is maybe more just a way to keep their focus on thinking about the interactions without having to worry about drawing a bunch of pretty widgets.
Re: VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment
#90What's the point of overlapping windows in text? Seems that tmux already fits the bill for this use case.