Peter_Cutting@newcastle.ac.uk (P. G. Cutting) (06/29/88)
Can a program be written to map X windows on to a character terminal. I beleive that the X server outputs bitmaps so the information would have to be intercepted at an earlier stage. Another way of putting it: Can any part of the X software be used in a program that implements a simplified version of X windows on a character terminal. Any references ? Thanks Peter_Cutting@uk.ac.newcastle
guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) (06/29/88)
Time for another plug for STDWIN. It would be hard or impossible to write a server that mapped most X requests to the low resolution (for everything except characters) found on a dumb terminal. However, you might design a toolkit allowing several implementations: one using X11, another using termcap, a third running on the Macintosh. The primitive operations in such a toolkit should be of a somewhat higher level than those found in X; e.g., menus and scroll bars might be built in, keyboard input would be directly in ASCII, all to support a better match between the limitations of a dumb (or just different) output device and the requirements of the application. I have desgined and written such a toolkit and baptized it STDWIN. It allows easy porting of applications between the following systems: X11, Apple Macintosh, any terminal supported by termcap, Atari ST. Plus any system you care to port it to. You are welcome to try it out; if you can wait a month, I'll be in the U.S. and will try to publish in on an anonymous ftp site. -- Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam guido@cwi.nl or mcvax!guido or guido%cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net [out-of-town from 4-15 July; at DEC SRC from 25 July till mid October]