Re: [XForms] drawing into a foreign window

[Patrick]

Hi Rick

I may have found an in terminal solution here(and a one for mortals!):

http://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/

Your framebuffer suggestion is a good one and very much appreciated though.

Have a great day-Patrick




On 12/29/2016 12:17 AM, Rick Engebretson wrote:
> I'm not sure this still works, but for simple drawing into a virtual 
> terminal you can (could) simply draw directly into the framebuffer 
> (/dev/fb0). IIRC, you can also draw on your XWindow terminal, too, but 
> you just get a mess. One trick on the Linux Virtual Terminal is to set 
> your scroll region so NCurses just writes to probably the bottom of 
> the screen leaving your drawing region alone. Controlling the scroll 
> region is one of the "console codes" escape sequences Jens mentioned.
>
> Not sure about Cobol, but with Pascal I had to write my own line 
> drawing (and other primitives) functions using methods like "Bresenham 
> functions." In the end I realized I was reinventing the wheel and 
> couldn't compete with an army of MIT and DEC professional programmers 
> who made X. But learning is fun, and modern framebuffer virtual 
> terminals on modern displays made even Thomas Dickey (maintainer of 
> both NCurses and XTerm, etc.) challenged. So who knows??
>
> If you are mortal like the rest of us the XForms Image library is a 
> very nice drawing framebuffer array with X widget tools.
>
> Patrick wrote:
> > Hi Jens, Hi Paul
> >
> > Paul, this looks like a good suggestion! and Jens's warning about it 
> > is noted :)
> >
> >
> > Hi Jens, I know what I am trying to do is weird, let me explain more.
> >
> > I really like COBOL and it's a good way to get beat up on mailing 
> > lists. It's evolved a lot of the years but it's criticisms are 
> > decades old and everyone seems to hate the language even if they know 
> > nothing about it.
> >
> > Anyhow, it has ncurses built in and in it's screen section, you can 
> > build text user interfaces really easily. Everything is tightly 
> > integrated and because GnuCOBOL compiles to intermediate C rather 
> > then Assembly, the runtime is small and hackable.
> >
> > I love-love this but I can't do 70% of what I want to do because I 
> > don't have the ability to draw or add pictures.
> >
> > I understand the ncurses windows have no relation to X windows. The 
> > thing is that in most cases the window that the terminal runs in is 
> > just an X window and if I write TUI data to part of it and GUI data 
> > to part of it, I should be able to have the best of both worlds. I 
> > understand that they cannot mix in the same areas though.
> >
> > Thanks again-Patrick
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 12/28/2016 03:28 PM, Paul wrote:
> > > Agreeing with all Jens' comments.
> > >
> > > You might try it the other way around.
> > >
> > > Create a window as usual using XForms.
> > >
> > > Get the Xwindow window ID of your window.
> > >
> > > Launch an xterm and use the -into option
> > > of xterm to make it use your window.
> > >
> > > xterm -into window_id is intended to allow
> > > embedding into other applications.  That
> > > may be what you want?
> > >
> > > --
> > > Paul Nicholson
> > > --