Re: looking ahead to 3.6

[Michael Goffioul]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:23 PM, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Feb 14, 2011, at 4:40 AM, Michael Goffioul wrote:
>
>> Additional comments:
>> 1) The terminal emulation problem under Windows exists in *all*
>> toolkits, as there's no pty concept Windows. Whatever the choice,
>> you'll have to fake terminal through pipes under Windows. To achieve
>> that, I hacked VTE a lot. But this can be re-done for any other
>> toolkit.
>> 2) Despite the terminal emulation problem, I'd still go that way in a
>> GUI, as this would provide the most consistent interface bewteen a
>> console version and a GUI (like having the same key bindings...). If
>> you want real hard-core developers ever to use a GUI, that's the right
>> choice to make. If you need better integration between readline and a
>> GUI, I think it would be possible to modify readline to add suitable
>> hooks.
>
> Michael,
> Since you already took a look at the Window PTY/pipes issue once for GTK+, 
> would you be willing to take a look at the QT terminal widget at
> http://qt-apps.org/content/show.php/QTermWidget?content=82832
> ?
>
> This was the work of a person who took Konsole and ripped out the terminal 
> emulator portions to make it "KDE free".  I have been able to compile it on 
> both Linux and OSX (???) and was wondering if you can assess how easy it 
> would be to modify for use on Windows.  As a side note, some of the comments 
> said it was also compilable on Solaris, so I assume any of the *NIX-y 
> platforms would work without much modification. I tried to compile on Windows 
> and it had problems with memory mapping functions, but I am sure that was 
> probably just the tip of the iceberg (and I don't really know Windows 
> programming).

I gave it a try and could get an initial version of qtermwidget working
on Windows/MSVC (thankfully, Qt is MSVC-friendly). It's far from problem-free,
but it's a starting point.

Michael.