[aklug] Re: console applications resource

From: Christopher Howard <cmhoward@frigidcode.com>
Date: Mon Nov 22 2010 - 19:56:07 AKST

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 05:51:28PM -0900, Tim Johnson wrote:
> * Arthur Corliss <acorliss@nevaeh-linux.org> [101122 14:04]:
> > 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.
>

Tell me how you really feel. ;) The word "bull-crap" here sounds like a code phrase for "I'd like you to argue with me", so I'll take it as an invitation to a little back and forth:

Your rebuttal is full of contradications and half-truths. First of all: strictly speaking, curses doesn't have to be used to fake a graphical interface, but it definitely has been historically. Take the ncurses-mode in Debian's "aptitude": you get drop down menus, text fields, and background colors all through the wonderful wealth of ncurses' interface widgets. It's not a real GUI, but it tries to look like one and therefore is /faking/ a GUI.

Yes, ncurses-based interfaces are based on character data, but it's hardly "simple". A lot of those characters are special escape codes that do things like changing the foreground and background color of other characters. These escape codes can even produce line borders, arrows, and blinking text. The library even comes with buffer support so you can switch back and forth between screen drawings at convenient times, just like you would in a simple 2D GUI program.

I never said that a person couldn't live practically "without X". I just said that it was not entirely honest to claim to live in a "graphics-less" environment when you are using a bunch of programs that strictly speaking aren't Command Line Interfaces.

You say that CLI is king. Really, however, programs like vim, emacs, bsd tetris, and so forth really aren't CLI. They are TUI (Text User Interface) which is a way of faking a GUI with escape codes, using special /graphical/ terminals that are designed to properly interpret them. In a CLI, everything is done at a command-line (e.g., a Bash prompt).

-- 
Christopher Howard
frigidcode.com
theologia.indicium.us
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Received on Mon Nov 22 20:01:41 2010

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