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Subject: Re: syscons driver
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 1995 20:08:21 +0100 (MET)
Cc: sos@FreeBSD.org, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, jdli@linux.csie.nctu.edu.tw,
        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <5800.820169871@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Dec 28, 95 08:57:51 am
From: sos@FreeBSD.org
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In reply to Jordan K. Hubbard who wrote:
> 
> > What gui toolkit - where - where - show me, maybe it could save me
> > writing some 1000's lines of code :) :)
> 
> I'll go hunting around, but I believe it's another hack..  I looked
> at it about a year ago and went "Ewww.  This was designed by somebody
> who'd never seen a GUI before!"

Oh well, thought so, but one can never know right..

For all the "unwashed masses", what I'm writing on currently is not
only a low level graphics lib, we have that allready :), no its a
higher level GUI kit that someday will be able to take your
(cough cough) MS Visual Basic *.frm files and make a semilar apperance
on a std VGA or X screen. Before I get flooded by mail about this
I will NOT release anything yet, but I'm sure ready to talk about the
idea/design of it. It is basically a set of "widgets" semilar to the
ones VB uses (well some of them) so that one can design the "looks"
with a tool (that I have NO intention to write), and then simply
write the called (in our case 'C') functions and voila, we have a 
nice GUI based app.

I think the main reasons we dont see all those nifty GUI based apps, is
1. we dont have the nessesary (easy to use) tools
2. what we have is based on X which have its own set of problems
3. there has been no other "simplistic" approach to this before (that I 
   know of)

I plan to satisfy (well at least try to) all 3 points with what I have
here in a very rough pre pre pre alpha release.

Part of the job has been done, mainly graph support in syscons, and
a start on a generic mouse deamon (that will also work in text mode
for easy cut&paste between vty's)
I have the low level graphics routines, plus some of the widgets
(button, labels, textbox, image), so I'm pretty confident that the
idea holds water. There is still lots to be done, that was my reason
asking for other references (there might be code to stea^H^H^H^H look
at out there)


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Soren Schmidt             (sos@FreeBSD.org)             FreeBSD Core Team
               So much code to hack -- so little time.