[GRASS5] GRASS GUI

[Joel Peter William Pitt]

Regarding widget toolkits:

I think wxWindows (wxwindows.org) is the way to go. Then it can by built 
natively for OSX, MS windows, GTK, etc.
I've always been cautious about Qt because of licensing issues on MS 
windows, but I hear that Qt4 will resolve this.

Regarding comments on interface: One thing that I would love to see is a 
specific GRASS shell, so when I'm typing in map parameters to a command 
I can use autocompletion. In the same manner that bash allows you to 
complete directories and filenames with tab, or shows you a list of 
possible alternatives if more than one completion exists.

The only way I use d.m right now is to organise the order of displaying 
of maps. Is there any command-line way to get the list of commands to 
reproduce the current display?

Joel

William Kyngesburye wrote:

> I think the GUI toolkit should run *natively* cross-platform.
>
> GTK: X11.  That is, on Mac OS X is requires the X11 environment.  I  
> saw the beginnings of a native Mac port, but it could take a while.   
> I'm not sure how it works on Windows, cygwin?  I think I saw a well  
> developed native port.
>
> Tcl/Tk: X11.  There are native builds of this on Mac and Windows.   
> But, when I tried to use that on Mac OS X I ran into conflicts  
> between X11 stuff and Mac OS X.  GRASS would have to be completely  
> divorced from X11.
>
> Qt: native from the ground up.  I just started playing with qgis.   
> From the binaries, it's a Mac application (or Windows, or X11),  
> though the GUI widgets are a lot like Windows.  I'm trying a build  
> from source (so I can update GDAL in it) and maybe there are some  
> settings to use some more native versions of things (like the open/ 
> save dialogs).
>
>
> As for a choice of GUI kits, I wonder if would be possible to  
> abstract the GUI functions in a GRASS library, and that will use  
> whichever GUI kit was built into that copy of GRASS.  It might even  
> then be possible to plug binaries of the GRASS GUI library into a  
> GRASS binary to switch between GUIs.  Maybe start with Qt and add  
> others later.  Just a thought.



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Joel Pitt, Room B534
Bio-Protection & Ecology Division
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