[GRASS-dev] Make terminal window optional?

[Steven Pawley]

Hi Vaclav,

Thanks for this. My 2c is that the terminal should be made as optional because it can definitely be confusing and intimidating/off-putting for new users. Apologies if I’ve confused some of the options but here are my thoughts regarding the start-up options.

Unfortunately (in terms of complexity) option 5 would my preference. I like what it inherits from option 4, in that “grass —text” would always start with a terminal and just “grass” will *always* opens the full desktop application/GUI.

However, once in the GUI, ideally you would be able to launch a terminal session from a menu option, e.g. a bit like Rstudio or VScode. This is obviously how you want to launch an R or Jupyter session, and it was be unfortunate to have to exit GRASS and restart a session with a terminal just to do this. Also, what happens when the GRASS GUI crashes and you are not running a terminal? One of the aspects that I really like about GRASS is that even if any particular component of the application, like the GUI crashes, the session continues and modules/scripts keep on running, so everything is usually recoverable.

If the implementation of option (5) is problematic, then I guess mixing the startup options by  “grass —gui —shell” to open both the GUI and a terminal (like currently) would be possible although it is a bit cumbersome for all of the people who routinely punch GRASS commands into the terminal etc.

Steve


> On Sep 5, 2020, at 9:05 PM, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 4. Make the shell start only in the text mode (grass --text) or with a new additional option (--shell), i.e., you get it, only when you actually ask for it. In other words, with --text, GRASS GIS would behave more like R or Octave, without that (with --gui), it would behave more like QGIS or any other GUI application. (This includes the no terminal from desktop launchers from option 2.)
> 

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