VTM: A Text-Based Desktop Environment (opens in new tab)

Yeah, I see it. I just don't get it. There's an awful lot of UX work being done to preserve an illusion that you have a bunch of fixed-size consoles that are arbitrarily arranged in a 2d space. Which, I guess, is the defining metaphor of GUI interfaces, but if that's what is desired, why create a console-only (if only in appearance) GUI? Text buffers in emacs or panes in screen or tmux can be made to have arbitrary size and dimension if you want to turn off wrapping and keep a longish scrollback. You can have as many buffers as you want, as many as your screen can accomodate visible at once and easily navigate them as you like. All you have to give up is the conceit that windows have independent physical size and location and embrace one that holds that you can have an arbitrary number of text buffers available to arrange, swap, hide, show, etc. Not trying to be nasty, but this feels like a bit of a cargo cult: someone stuck in the windows GUI metaphor trying to create a version of CLI metaphor they don't fully grasp. Of course, the fact that those of us who prefer the CLI metaphor are rapidly dying off is relevant here---but seizing all of the disadvantages of an all-text environment without any of the advantages seems ill-advised. That said, no one needs my approval. If this works for you (and I'll readily admit it's kind of cool), what do you care that I don't get it.

Wow. The organizational lines and brightly colored windows make it look like a flower.

Agreed. But using an entire character-width for that purpose is extravagant in this example (use of background colour would be better. Right now, some of those windows are !0% border). In a larger area, you can use unicode or even the drawing characters in MS 8-bit ASCII for a single-pixel hairline plus padding for both windows' text). I guess my take is that this is sacrificing an awful lot of real-estate to simulate overlapping windows, which is a feature of dubious utility in a pure text environment. "Users expect them" is probably the most common and egregious excuse for bad UX design, but I do understand why.

Except in this case, it's not real, you can't read any characters below another window.

And, of course, ed is the default editor. :-) I exert geek dominance over introduction to C students by demoing using ed to modify a source file. After which I amuse myself for the remainder of the term: "Source Control? Syntax highlighting? Luxury! When I was young we had to hand-magnetize knitting needles and edit files one bit at a time directly on a Winchester drive!"

More seriously, I think the 80 column width is just too constraining with more modern languages that aren't remotely as terse as C–not to mention a limit that aggressively militates against in-line commenting. We also have monitors and fonts with resolutions that permit easily reading much denser use of the visual display. I mostly go with 120 chars now (in practice, that means that lines still won't wrap when I print source code files) and however many lines fit into the display pane.

Yeah, why did we ever stop using it as default for everything. I grow weary of graphics and options with said graphics.

It definitely was super cool. The windows had types, could be resized, had titles, dropdown menus, and form controls. The editor had syntax highlighting. And most importantly (at least for me at the time), there was a language reference included with the help system which had hyperlinking, so you could click through pages about the supported syntax and various topics, gleaning a wealth of information. All on DOS!

It was super cool!!! I had so much fun emulating it drawing single and double line text borders, with shadows. Oh ASCII chart how I miss thee.

Windows 1.0 didn't actually use box-drawing characters for any of this, of course. For example, the System menu in the top left corner of each window was three horizontal lines, just like a hamburger menu of today. Scrollbar buttons did not look like any box-drawing character.

The Maximize button in the top right did look like a box-drawing character, but that's really about the only resemblance I see.

(I developed a DOS GUI for email, Transend PC, in the early '80s that used box-drawing characters, and soon after started writing SQLWindows for Windows 1.0, so pretty familiar with both.)

1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_TopView

I had just started working at Gupta Technologies at the time, and for a short while we seriously considered developing for TopView instead of Windows.

Stumpwm would probably be attractive as well, because Lisp. http://stumpwm.github.io/

this is the maximalism that i come to hackernews to find.

I would suggest keeping around some versions :) I use git for this very reason locally when I'm futzing with settings, it's immeasurably handy for experimenters and config file junkies.

Same as any other WM (although I don't actually use exwm). Enable ssh for troubleshooting or use boot flags to boot to console.

Although I played with DesqView, that was not the menuing system I used to use - It had some monumental name for the day, like SuperMenu or MenuGold 2000 or some such... Internet search not getting any hits that match. Oh well.

Ah, SideKick... TSR hell days...

No, went and looked through my little 5 1/4 binder, not sure I still have the menu utility...

But for those of you who were doing this back in 1991, here is a list of the utils I carried on 5 1/4":

Gibson's SpinRite

MS-DOS 6.22

pcAnywhere 5.0

PKUnzip 2.04G

Everex - The Edge Utility (BIOS settings app)

Easy Data 286 Setup for 10-12MHz

Laser Digital Phoenix Setup

Wyse Tech - Setup & Test

IBM Diags PC/AT

Utron Inc - Neat 286 Setup Disk

Misc. Novell files

QEMM 386 5.10

Brief 2.0

SuperStor V2.04

XTreeGold

Mountain Tape (tape backup)

Norton Utils 5.0

ProComm Plus

Intel Satisfaction

MicroHouse IDE

Diagnose

DOS 5.0

DOS 3.3

Checkit 3.0

Scan80, Clean80, CPAV

Norton Antivirus

LapLink III

And somewhere in my office I still have the multiple boxes of 3 1/2" disks, both the 10 disks boxes, and bigger 100 Disk box, that saw a lot of wear and tear in my backpack - I skateboarded to clients around Santa Cruz, so everything had to fit into my backpack at the time.

+1

SVG over HTTP/2 in Wasm with WebGL1 (for compat)

I suspect a lot easier with modern graphics libraries and so on

Not sure I'd bother with MGR itself, but instead do something similar.

It's not as compelling now that we don't do much over serial links anymore.

The modern day version of this really is the browser/HTML.

I remember being intrigued at the time by the idea of using this protocol over a MUD (telnet / TCP socket carrying text) connection.

That's only true for TrueType Fonts in graphical mode.

In text-mode, characters are "drawn" by simply writing their ASCII code point into VRAM and writing another byte (two 4-bit values really) in an additional "attribute" buffer to set the foreground and background colour.

Programmers can swap out the default character set to provide their own typeface and graphical characters for use as window borders, shadows, etc.

(S)VGA text-mode is as cheap as it gets in terms of computational complexity.

True in the general case - but a fixed size font drawn in a grid over the screen? There's a lot you can to do make it very cheap

Depends. If you render it yourself in a frame buffer with anti aliasing and whatnot sure, but real text mode or using bitmap fonts is dirt cheap.

I suggest running this on a server vs xfce/lxde/some other low overhead windows environment and get back with us on the overall load on the machine vs graphics. Holistically this is going to be a much smaller footprint.

why not use the logout shortcurt ^d ? this abort sequence is so much move involved vs just ^c ^d -ing

Thanks. Corrected.

Looks fun like that on iOS Prompt, too.

Must be looking for ANSI instead of VT100.

Mismatched emulator modes reminds me of BBS days.

>Pi Zero?

Correct, sorry brain fart.

>That can totally run a desktop environment and browser. Especially something light like XFCE or Enlightenment

Even regular sized Pi struggle with web browsing on a standard browser (Firefox/Chromium), I know that it largely has to do with the web pages themselves being memory hogs, but then again a similar specced Chromebook x86 doesn't hang while browsing(Same web page/Same no of Tabs); I think it largely has to do with browsers not getting optimised for ARM architecture on Linux.

I had the same issue with XFCE i.e. browsers hang after sometime, as for Enlightenment 3rd party apps didn't work last time I tried with Pi3[1] has the situation changed now?

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/getting-smoother-desktop-experien...

Try a different terminal. It does that for me in URxvt, but works fine in xterm.

aka one gif video on imgur

What settings? Mines more like an abstract color art piece but not so much a desktop environment.

There's also a window claiming to be Windows' CMD. As I can't figure out how to enter text in any of these windows (I'm assuming it's disabled, otherwise CHAOS) I can't tell if it's just a vestigial window of if it's a true output.

The topics on the Github repo list both Linux and Windows. The Readme calls itself "aka Monotty Desktop". That makes me think they may have written the code for the Mono runtime, so I'm expecting it's C#.

I had played around with a similar idea in C# some months back, though I was targeting only Windows because it took P-Invoking into some Win32 APIs to get most of the functionality.