[aklug] Re: console applications resource

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Under "mplayer": was he playing a dvd video with only framebuffer support? Does that really work?
>
> Curious for other peoples' opinions: It seem to me like claiming to live in a "graphics-less" environment, while running a bunch of programs with ncurses (and similar) interfaces, is not quite honest. You're just faking graphics with escape codes and colored characters. (Playing tetris with an ncurses interface is just silly...) To be a true purist, you'd have to do everything from the command-line. (E.g., trade out vim for ed.)

I call bull-crap on your assertion that curses is "faking" graphics. It's a
simple screen control API for a *character* interface. Nothing more,
nothing less. Anything that's strictly a character interface is not
graphics, ASCII renderers notwithstanding. Where are you going to draw the
line next, ban VT100 control codes?

Personally, I do live practically in a graphic-less environment. X, for me,
is just a way to get ten xterms on the screen at one time. But, as people
pointed with the screen program, even going without X altogether is hardly
a handicap. I don't need graphics to do my job.

For real work in the enterprise market the CLI is king. It's the only thing
that easily (and portably) lends itself to automation.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Mon Nov 22 13:57:26 2010