Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!mcvax!guido
From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: windows on dumb terminal question
Message-ID: <386@piring.cwi.nl>
Date: 29 Jun 88 12:11:32 GMT
References: <3420@cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk>
Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Organization: The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Amoebae
Lines: 24

Time for another plug for STDWIN. 

It would be hard or impossible to write a server that mapped most X
requests to the low resolution (for everything except characters) found
on a dumb terminal.  However, you might design a toolkit allowing
several implementations: one using X11, another using termcap, a third
running on the Macintosh.  The primitive operations in such a toolkit
should be of a somewhat higher level than those found in X; e.g., menus
and scroll bars might be built in, keyboard input would be directly in
ASCII, all to support a better match between the limitations of a dumb
(or just different) output device and the requirements of the
application.

I have desgined and written such a toolkit and baptized it STDWIN.  It
allows easy porting of applications between the following systems: X11,
Apple Macintosh, any terminal supported by termcap, Atari ST.  Plus any
system you care to port it to.

You are welcome to try it out; if you can wait a month, I'll be in the
U.S. and will try to publish in on an anonymous ftp site.
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@cwi.nl or mcvax!guido or guido%cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net
[out-of-town from 4-15 July; at DEC SRC from 25 July till mid October]