[GRASS5] New gui.tcl generic user interface

[Michael Barton]

WOW!!!

This is excellent. It makes GRASS much easier to use and gives it a much
more polished look.

I'm glad you like the button "icons". It will really help people to have
this visual consistency between the GIS Manager and module dialogs. (If
anyone out there has mini-graphic design experience and would like to get
involved with making them even better, I'd welcome the help. )

I'd like to somehow collaborate with you on somehow better merging what you
are doing and the GIS Manager option panes. The latter are all hard coded.
I've long realized that this is inefficient, but until now didn't have much
in the way of an alternative. With the GUI output you've proposed, it should
be possible to capture the option settings from your new dialogs and reroute
them into the GIS Manager as appropriate. This will take some hefty recoding
to start with. After that, however, it should make things MUCH easier.

Congratulations! This is an enormous improvement.

Michael


On 3/13/06 8:34 PM, "Cedric Shock" <cedricgrass at shockfamily.net> wrote:

> Good evening,
> 
> I have hammered out a new gui.tcl. This is the file that produces the generic
> graphical user interface for all of the other programs.
> 
> 
> Screenshots:
> 
> g.region, as it first comes up:
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui1.png
> 
> Sample output:
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui2.png
> 
> A fake test-script that shows guisections for a command like g.region
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui3.png
> 
> Output showing errors and progress bar:
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui7.png
> 
> File selection, very wide due to extremely long description text. This module
> would benefit from labels:
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui4.png
> 
> Multiple selection, same deal:
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui5.png
> 
> Dropdown box, nothing has changed:
> http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/grass/newgui6.png
> 
> 
> Changes:
> 
> Options and Output are now displayed in tabs instead of panes
> 
> There is a new command label which shows the current command as it is edited.
> It has a button for copying the command to the clipboard. (Might be worth
> noting in wish 2074)
> 
> Programs reporting guisections will have a tab made for options in each
> toplevel section. Finer section grouping is obeyed, but no labels are created
> or displayed.
> 
> The options frames scroll with the mouse wheel.
> 
> If possible the window opens wide enough to display its contents. This is
> accomplished by adding a binding to the scrolled frames which report their
> widths to their parent frames.
> 
> Programs using the label and description attributes on options or tabs will
> now have the description displayed as balloon help.
> 
> The help button is not enabled if no help file exists for the program. (closes
> wish 3799)
> 
> The type and required text for options is displayed right justified.
> 
> Module information is displayed differently. Both the label and description
> are displayed if available. Module is displayed with an icon if a matching
> one can be found in $(GISBASE)/etc/icons. See /gui/icons/README for more
> information.
> 
> Buttons for file selection are displayed with an open file icon.
> 
> Buttons for selecting database elements and symbols are displayed with an icon
> if a matching one can be found in $(GISBASE)/etc/icons.
> 
> It is now possible to determine when a command has finished executing. Output
> text has an added graphic along with the command text when the command is
> run. When the command finishes another graphic is displayed along with the
> text "Done."
> 
> 
> Testing:
> Ran lots of different commands both from the console and from gis.m. Only
> tested against tcl/tk 8.4 on Ubuntu Linux.
> 
> 
> Patch:
> Patch of lib/gis/gui.tcl and gui/Makefile is attached
> 
> gui.tcl also needs icons. To get the icons directory do the following in
> grass6/:
> tar xvfz gui-icons.tar.gz
> 
> I believe a "make install" is all that is needed, but I'm not sure.
> 
> 
> Enjoy,
> 
> Cedric Shock

___________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ  85287

WWW - http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton
Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671