On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:34:24PM +0100, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: > On Thursday, 23 February 2012 at 21:17:35 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: > >Taking the idea of an in-terminal video player further, what about > >a general escape sequence for "application-specific output"? > > <html>.....
That gives you the funny situation where trying to edit a HTML file will interpret the tags instead of displaying them. If your editor is unaware of that, then you have the even funnier situation where editing a tag (i.e. temporarily breaking HTML syntax) will cause it to come out as text, and once you have a fully formed tag, then it magically gets rendered again. A twisted form of WYSIWYG. :P > seriously, once you take the in-terminal stuff too far, you > have a beast of a program that does everything; you end up > with something like a web browser or nested X server, and > you've lose the original beauty of the terminal. No, the idea is *not* to have the terminal do everything, but allow other programs to do it. > This is the path I started on, and ended up with what I called > the D Windowing System - which is still on my todo list, but > has been for a long time and will surely be for a long time > more. lol... I suppose. > But, I started with a terminal that can optionally output > images. Then wanted improved character display and figured > if it does images, it can be a bitmap drawable. > > Then wanted multiple channels... and at this point, you have > a poor man's X. True. > Realizing this, I went full into it and shifted gears to a higher > level X kind of thing, where you make an app based on widgets on > a grid, which would work in text mode or graphical mode. But, I > didn't get too far before work took over my time. Actually, I've thought of that before. It's something I'd love to have. The main complaint with writing a real X11 app is that *everything* is graphical, so to do something as simple as print a string requires an inordinate amount of code. You need to create a subwindow or subdrawable, load a font (with all that living nightmare that font resolution is), calculate font proportions, spacing, line wrapping, and do all of the above in an event-based model. At the end of the day you've reinvented a GUI toolkit with a text widget. [...] > But, on a terminal, I just don't think images are a fit there. Might > as well just make something like a gui image viewer app and keep a > more traditional terminal. > > Though, I'd prefer to be more like vga text mode than VT100 in terms > of capabilities. The way I see it, it's a sort of "VGA-enabled text mode" terminal, where you can intermix graphics on what is basically a character grid. Not a full-fledged windowing system embedded in xterm. (I mean, with graphics capabilities the application *could* implement a windowing system, but that's the app's problem, not the terminal's.) T -- One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the internet is that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying the internet is reliable to the point of invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from the article "Giving it all away"
