wingrass: launching gui and shell [was: Re: [GRASS-dev] Wingrass and TclTk]

[Michael Barton]

Since I don't use Windows, I can't contribute to most of this, but I'm
trying to follow because it's important to have a Windows version available
for my students. I have a few GUI-related comments below.


On 11/1/07 2:28 PM, "Paul Kelly" <paul-grass at stjohnspoint.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> I'm trying to follow what's going on here but it's  bit confusing - would
> help if somebody posted a diff of the proposed changes to init.bat (the
> usual way). Have a few comments anyway about my original philosophy of why
> init.bat does things the way it does, which hopefully might help clarify
> things.
> 
> There is not supposed to be a command-prompt running separately from that
> included in gis.m - I thought we were moving towards the idea of having a
> command prompt built into the gronsole Window and using that (I think it's
> improved further in wxgrass) - so that was the point of that. I think it
> is confusing for new users having to type exit in a command Window to
> totally exit GRASS as well as just going File-->Exit in the GUI menus (is
> that what's being proposed here?).

I second this. 

The command prompt in GRONSOLE works to run all GRASS modules and scripts
EXCEPT those that require an interactive (e.g., curses) xterm interface.
There aren't many of these left and only some of those will run well in
Windows I suspect. It will also run Unix commands (many unavailable in
Windows anyway) that don't require an interactive response (e.g., ls, cat,
etc). Beyond the interactive part, I'm not sure why some people think it is
so limited. It is designed to be a GRASS terminal, not a general purpose,
everything Unix terminal.

I'd love to have GRASS exit directly from the GUI exit command, or at least
have an "exit GUI" and "exit GRASS" entry. But apparently it is not easy to
do with the current init.sh. I don't know how to rewrite this to make it
possible, though Glynn has offered a few suggestions.

> 
> If somebody wants a GUI and console then I think it's OK to require them
> to start GRASS in text mode and run gis.m from the command prompt. So I
> actually think Moritz's new gis.m.bat is a really good idea. I just was
> too lazy to get round to implementing that before. And there was some
> complication about the way the gis.m Shell script was generated although I
> think I simplified things a little bit.

If we can do this across all platforms, it would be very nice.

...
> 
> That's a good idea. ISTR that the gis.m shell script now also runs gis.m
> in the background, i.e. you don't need to run it as "gis.m &" any more -
> is that right?

Correct. Does this work on Windows though?

> 
...
> 
>> Only thing which is a bit annoying: you have to close the two (cmd and
>> gis.m) seperately (i.e. gis.m does not close when you type exit in
>> cmd.exe). But that's minor in my eyes.
> 
> Users who don't normally use the command line may not know to type exit -
> I think it's a big enough issue not to introduce it as a problem when it
> wasn't there before - see my comments above.

I agree. This is a pain for most computer users today. I don't find it a
problem, but it makes GRASS look somewhat archaic.

Michael

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton