[GRASS-dev] XDRIVER

[Moritz Lennert]

Roger,

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I can imagine that such a 
long-grown home made GUI gives you a productivity which will be very 
difficult to reproduce quickly with any other tool.

Some tentative comments to your explanations:

On 14/04/11 15:16, Roger Miller wrote:
> First is that the GUI should be organized and visually simple, not
> confusing to the eye and it should offer only a few choices at any time.
> If you're already accustomed to looking at your GUI -- I'm not -- then
> you probably won't get confused by it's visual presentation.

Yes, this is obviously very subjective.

> Second is that no capability should be added to the GUI unless it can be
> made simpler and/or faster than the command line operation.

In a certain way this is the same philosophy as with the mainstream 
GRASS GUI: most of the GUI is just an automatically created "graphical 
wrapper" around the command line. Only those tools that make sense only 
in a graphical environment are implement directly in the GUI. The rule 
has (almost) always been: everything you can do in the GUI, you should 
be able to do in the command line, unless this doesn't make any sense. 
The only (in the current development trunk aka GRASS 7) exception is the 
display system, which you cannot really interact with from the command 
line, but it is foreseen to change this.

You might be able to salvage a part of your GUI by using the direct 
rendering option [1] of the d.* commands to render into an image that 
you can then display within your Tcl GUI. Also, see ximgview/wximageview 
[2].

[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/grass70/manuals/html70_user/cairodriver.html 
("GRASS_RENDER_IMMEDIATE")
[2] http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass/trunk/visualization

Moritz