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

[Moritz Lennert]

Michael Barton wrote:

> 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.

The enourmous advantage of using the command line for grass is the 
almost unlimited capacity to mix grass commands with others or just to 
be able to combine different grass commands. The scripts in the scripts 
directory are a perfect example of such combination.

I know I can use the gronsole prompt to type in grass commands, but this 
is only a very small part of the added value of the command line. I know 
I can use some other shell commands on the gronsole, but it's not easy 
to combine them into scripts and ISTR that the commands you can use are 
limited (e.g. can you run a 'for * in g.mlist' type of loop ?).

AFAICT, windows commands do not work at all.

So, at this stage, I don't think that the gronsole prompt can replace a 
command line.

The question, therefore, is, whether we think that most windows users 
should have access to a command line by default, or whether this is 
confusing to most and thus should be left to those who feel comfortable 
launching grass directly from a cmd.exe window with the -text option (or 
modify their .grasssrc6 file by hand).

Moritz