Graphical Terminal Environment

[Mike Meyer]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2012 23:39:57 -0500
Brandon Falk <bfalk_bsd at brandonfa.lk> wrote:

> I've been thinking for a while about possibly making an extremely
> lightweight environment that supports full monitor resolution, custom
> fonts, and terminals... that's about it.
> 
> Essentially, an x11 that only supports tiling xterms all over the place. I
> do everything through terminals, and I think it'd be a fun project to make
> something that's only purpose is to make it so you can use your entire
> screen to its fullest (larger resolutions, smaller fonts, etc). Just a
> graphical tty.

Since no one has mentioned it, if that's all you want, then all you
really need to do is figure out how create one max-sized terminal on
each physical screen. The screen command (ports/sysutils/screen) will
then let you create multiple shell sessions on each screen, including
tiling multiple sessions on the screen. It didn't interact well with
emacs, and emacs would do pretty much everything I wanted it to do, so
I stopped using it a while back for that kind of thing.

I also find the comment that "X is quite large" amusing, because I
wind up comparing it to the competition (the Mac UI being the only
other current one that runs on top of Unix), and it looks quite
compact. You might try a custom build of X, turning off all the stuff
you don't need, and disabling the loading of any extensions you don't
need, and see how much you can shrink it by before tackling rewriting
it. You may even be able to lose the requirement for a pointer.

I'm also curious as to why you want the ability to draw lines,
circles, etc. to handle an array of terminals. Screen shows that can
be done with nothing but a CGA. It might be education, though.

   <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.

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