On 2017-05-04 12:03, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: >> I've not used Freevision/Turbovision before, but am experimenting with >> James Clarke's DialEdit as an experiment to see whether I can create a >> fallback user interface for use if an interactive program is running in >> a shell session. The Lazarus side of things isn't a problem, I know from >> the past how to break out before the GUI is initialised and so on. > I was mistaken, this can't be done easily so there's no advantage in > trying to build a single program for both GUI and text modes. >
And it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t offer up an alternative. fpGUI based applications can indeed do what you want. I do this all the time for command line handling. If a GUI program is run from a terminal (no X11 server), it will still output to the console telling the user what program it is, version info, command line parameters and importantly, that it requires a GUI to function. In a GUI environment (eg: MS Windows) it will display a dialog with all the same information, if the -h command line parameter was passed in. Here is such output of one of my programs (run from the login terminal - no X11): ======================================= $ ./osmail -h Opensoft Mail & News v1.00 (build 18) Compiled on 2017/05/01 11:09:41 The following parameters are available: h, help Shows this help lc Logs debug information to the console lv Logs debug information to a visual screen ls Logs debug information to debug server l Logs debug information to a file style Applies a custom style to the application. Available options are: "auto", "Win2000", "Motif", "Carbon", "Plastic Dark", "Plastic Dark Gray", "Plastic Medium Gray", "Plastic Light Gray" NOTE: This program requires a graphical windowing environment to function. $ ======================================= So as you can see, what you want to do is possible. Maybe LCL just needs more work around its initialization code - being less eager to initialize its GUI. ;-) Regards, Graeme -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ My public PGP key: http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal