[GRASS-user] grass70 and display monitor

Michael Barton Michael.Barton at asu.edu
Sat Dec 5 10:44:05 EST 2009


On Dec 5, 2009, at 2:27 AM, Hamish wrote:

> Markus wrote:
>> I type in bash CTRL-R and a fraction of what I remember of
>> the name, then maybe another few CTRL-R to cycle to the right
>> one. Enter and I see it.
>
> fwiw I find ^r a bit confusing to use. (user ignorance of the sublties
> I'm sure..)
>
> I much prefer to use PgUp/PgDn after typing the partial command,
>
> create a file called ~/.inputrc containing:
> ################################
> set prefer-visible-bell
>
> # -------- Bind page up/down wih history search ---------
> "\e[5~": history-search-backward
> "\e[6~": history-search-forward
> ################################
>
> I got really used to this in the matlab console (up/down arrow there)
> and it hurt not to have it in bash until I learned the above trick.
>
>
> for my 2c I think it's ultimately a losing battle to try and  
> reimplement
> bash ("poorly", to quote the famous phrase) and we should ship a  
> minimal
> wx based ximgview/qiv/display app with auto refesh on file update and
> minimal g.region/d.zoom/d.where (right click menu only, strictly  
> k.i.s.s.
> like d.mon). I doubt it would take much effort to write or maintain as
> long as we don't try to make it much more than a window into the data.
> then hardcore folks can use csh/bash/emacs/whatever as they like  
> without
> the overhead of a gui.

This is not understanding what is involved to do this. It IS a  
considerable effort to write and maintain a second interactive display  
that is a retro mimic of an old xmon.

It is is probably not a considerable effort to write and maintain a  
script that wraps display commands with an image viewer with automatic  
refresh. Keep in mind that the syntax would not be d.rast ...  But it  
would still be a command line display. This is not a GUI. That's why  
it is doable with minimal effort.

The difficulty is creating a display that IS another GUI--that is a  
display interface that allows the user to use a mouse to control the  
display and other module functions like changing the region. Having  
written two of these, I have some idea of what is involved. Doing the  
menus for the 300+ commands is trivial. Creating a mouse-driven zoom  
box that changes the display to zoom in or out of a map is a lot of  
work and code. I'm afraid that I don't have the time or inclination to  
create and maintain a separate retro GUI for a few users, no matter  
how much I love you all. And I still can't understand why yet another  
mouse-operated GUI is needed.

Also, none of the comments I've yet seen on the list suggests that  
anyone has actually tried the command line interface that Martin and I  
DID build into the wxPython GUI at the request of the dev crowd. It is  
not an attempt to reimplement bash, but to offer an alternate way to  
interact with GRASS by typing commands. This DOES leverage the display  
and mouse-interaction code we have already built and maintain. You can  
type d.* commands and have maps displayed. You can then interact with  
the displayed maps with a mouse to zoom, measure, and query. Since you  
are going to use a mouse anyway, it is faster to click one button on  
the display you are already working with than to type "d.measure" from  
the keyboard. It is considerably easier to create and maintain a way  
to type commands from within the existing GUI than it is to create a  
2nd GUI. However this CLI can't be improved without input.

Michael

>
> it's too much to ask users to find a download an image viewer of their
> own, especially when it's probably less than a few hundred lines of  
> code
> to ship our own wx based version.
>
> for one thing I'd consider running that tunneled over ssh+X to a  
> remote
> number cruncher, but not a real GUI. a while ago while traveling and
> only a borrowed win2k + puTTY to work with I rigged up a system where
> the png driver wrote the display image across to a apache public dir
> which I could reload in the web browser. not ideal, but it worked.
>
>
> Hamish
>
>
>
>



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