Re: [dev] ncurses or ...

From: Edgaras <devoas_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2014 12:07:44 +0200

On Sat, Feb 01, 2014 at 01:11:35AM +0000, Nick wrote:
> Quoth Dimitris Zervas:
> > So, why not use surf as the abstract layer I was thinking before
>
> That is a terrible, terrible idea. surf has an OK interface, but
> webkitgtk is horrible, and the idea of using it for a base for
> anything but the web is absurd in a suckless context.
I totally agree here. Browsers are one of the most sucky kinds of software
there is, mostly because everyone tries to stick thier shit into web/html. It
ends up being huge pile of god know what. Morover the trend to write "portable
software" as web apps seems totally asine to me.

> Has anybody in this discussion used tcl/tk? I think the idea of
> defining some fifo based interface concept is generally going to
> lead to much more complexity than it solves (c.f. wmii vs. dwm).
I have toyed with tcl/tk and find them to be very nice, both tcl language, and
tk as gui toolkit especially. To be fair tcl has it pecularities, but otherwise
its quite nice language which is oriented around text/strings. I think this
means that it's close to unix philosphy and very suitable for interfacing with
various utilities.

> Oh, and to come in on an earlier point that was made, TUI sucks, the
> only good thing about it is that TUI programs tend to have better
> keybindings and scriptability.
Well my thoughs on interface: CLI is very good because it is "unidimensional"
streams/lines of texts. Which is mostly simple to understand and handle.
Trouble is we sometimes need two dimensional representation of data (very
likely that is overused). And for this task we have GUI and TUI, realistically
GUI should be superior to TUI, but sometimes you just do not have graphical
access, and then having TUI might be quite nice. And even though ncurses seem
to be kinda sucky, I think most of GUI toolkits do not fare much better. There
might be exceptions (like mentioned tk, which allows very simple and quick
creation of guis, though not in C...) I think it would be hard to say that gtk
or qt is significantly better then curses. I believe most suckiness of curses
comes from the fact that it has to know how to interact with tons terminals and
not from the part that its TUI interface library (though former flows from the
latter).
Received on Sun Feb 02 2014 - 11:07:44 CET

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