Re: Text mode gtk

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Pavel Machek <pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> writes:

> Hi!
> 
> Some time ago you wrote me that [good] text mode gtk is impossible. I
> tried to argue, and did not hear from you since then.
> 
> Why do you think so? From my experiments it looks pretty usable.

Hmmm, I'm not sure how to be polite about this...

 Importance of keeping GTK+ working nicely in GUI mode 99.999%
 Importance of getting GTK+ working in text mode 0.001%

At least from my perspective (I'm only one of the GTK+ developers)
I'm basically not interested in making any changes to GTK+
for the purposes of text mode.

IMO, it is simply impossible to have something be a good
graphics mode GUI and a good text mode UI simultaneously.

(It might be interesting to see some screenshots if you
have some, but basically, I can't imagine anything
that would change my current opinions.)

I want to be upfront about that so that you don't feel
that you've been encouraged to spend a lot of time on
something that doesn't get into GTK+.
 
> As of now, is someone working on redoing themes? One of things I'd
> appretiate would be possibility for checkboxes which are not
> square-shaped [I need them much wider than their height.]

Reworking themes is going to wait until after GTK+ 1.4, I think.
 
> Last think: is there chance to push cursor drawing to gdk?
> 
> 1) MSWindows could benefit from it because MSW do their cursor
> drawings theirselfs
> 
> 2) curses need it.

Not really.

a) Cursor drawing by hand will be slow
b) Cursor drawing ny hand in X is pretty much impossible
c) GTK+ is meant for windowing systems. In a windowing
   system, GTK+ has control over only a portion of the screen.

Regards,
                                        Owen