A desktop environment without graphics (tmux-like)

114 pointsposted 3 days ago
by mustaphah
(github.com)

33 Comments

ryao

12 hours ago

I do not plan to try this but I do wonder how well the terminal version of WordPerfect would work in this.

Also, if sixel support were added, it could support graphics. See:

https://github.com/taviso/wpunix/wiki/Terminals

If sixels somehow are already supported, then it does support graphics.

mxuribe

12 hours ago

Well, i remember a time when MS Word was run within DOS, yes, DOS as in the old operating system....so while i never used WordPerfect, i would not be surprized if such a thing existed.

This DE looks quite a bit like DOS - or at least the UI seen via apps within DOS. I didn't care much for DOS back in the day...but now, i like it...of course it might be simple rose-colored nostalgia. :-)

lproven

5 hours ago

> i remember a time when MS Word was run within DOS

The penultimate DOS version of MS Word is freeware. MS released Word 5.5 as freeware as a Y2K fix for all previous versions.

It's quite usable. I've written articles using it.

You can run it under Linux or macOS easily using DOSemu, on 64-bit Windows with VDOS+.

I wrote about how, with a pic of it working:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/friday_foss_fest_runn...

Sadly, the last ever version, 6.0, is much better, with more keystrokes in common with Word 6 for Windows and Mac, and that's not freeware.

nunobrito

3 hours ago

edit.com was a fantastic text editor. So easy, so intuitive. Never understood why nano wasn't able to compete. Anyways, I'm nowadays a user of "micro" on linux for text editing.

lproven

2 hours ago

I totally agree.

I use Tilde myself, which is very close.

https://github.com/gphalkes/tilde

I have written about it:

"Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976"

https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor/

Nobody got the gag in the title. 1976 was when Vi first appeared.

nunobrito

an hour ago

Hey, thanks. I've installed and tried out. The opening menu explained the key settings and it was just Edit from MSDOS. Very good, they even improved to exit the editor using ^Q.

I really don't know why so many people are against having a bar with menus and using the arrows to navigate. It is intuitive and easy, that editor really hit the spot. Thank you for the tip.

technothrasher

11 hours ago

> so while i never used WordPerfect, i would not be surprized if such a thing existed.

WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days. I made money in high school with side jobs teaching people to use WordPefect for DOS, and making utilities to convert and process WordPerfect files for small businesses.

I wrote all of my high school papers on WordPerfect for the Amiga, which was basically just a straight port of the text-only DOS version.

lelanthran

3 hours ago

> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.

In my part of the world, on MSDOS, MS Word was not even in competition with WordPerfect.

It was only with the advent of Windows (more specifically, Win95) that MS Word started seeing non-fractional percentage of usage compared to WordPerfect 5.1

lproven

5 hours ago

> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.

Ha! I'd say it was more accurate to say that MS Word tried to compete with WordPerfect.

It was only with the rise of Windows that Word became a contender, and WordPerfect was relegated to trying to compete.

> a straight port of the text-only DOS version.

Just out of interest: WP was a Data General app. The DOS version was a port, as was the Amiga version, SCO Xenix, classic MacOS, all the others. The native app was a DG minicomputer program.

Part of its competitiveness in the pre-GUI era was that WordPerfect was very portable and the company ported it to almost every OS going, complete with its massive suite of state-of-the-art printer drivers.

If you were not using a DG Nova minicomputer then you were running a port.

But as GUIs became standard, they almost all included printing subsystems, using soft fonts rendered by the same code that rendered stuff on screen. Printers' own built-in fonts became irrelevant: GUIs just dumped bitmaps to the printer.

So WordPerfect's best-in-the-industry printer drivers, which supported every printer in the world and could make it do backflips, became irrelevant.

Cthulhu_

5 hours ago

WP was still used for typing practice back in uuhh... 1998/1999, I think they intentionally used that instead of their Windows counterparts to minimize distractability.

mxuribe

11 hours ago

Good on you that you made money that way in high school!

Scoundreller

7 hours ago

WP5 was basically 40x60 (or whatever) in DOS. I still remember the royal blue background.

WP6 also ran in DOS but had a full fledged GUI. Ran a bit slow on the 486 but wow!

snozolli

11 hours ago

This DE looks quite a bit like DOS - or at least the UI seen via apps within DOS.

I'm definitely getting Turbo Pascal 5 vibes. Not 6, though, because that added ASCII drop-shadows.

lelanthran

8 hours ago

> Not 6, though, because that added ASCII drop-shadows.

I see a drop shadow on a button; not sure if that specific console application had the button or if the button is part of the DE.

lelanthran

4 hours ago

I use Vim with SLIME. Multiple splits, multiple tabs, multiple applications, can type stuff into a buffer and then SLIME can send that as commands to the applications.

For example, I use `psql` in a split, and doing `C-c C-c` sends the statement in my current buffer (delineated with newlines) to `psql`. I do the same with all other console applications.

nxobject

an hour ago

I'm noticing that desktop-tui - at least over ssh - oesn't handle terminal resizing/SIGWINCH. Let me cogitate on why this might be the case.

lproven

5 hours ago

It looks impressive but it duplicates a tonne of existing functionality from TWIN, which has been around for about 25 years or more.

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_(windowing_system)

And both of them seem to re-implement their own, inferior, versions of the TurboVision text-mode "widget toolkit":

https://tvision.sourceforge.net/

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

A merger could result in something greater than the sum of its parts.

Waraqa

4 hours ago

It would be useful if there are a comparison for their resources usage especially for people who need them in constrained resources environments.

lproven

2 hours ago

Hmmm.

I mean, I agree it'd be interesting. But useful? Compared to basically any form of GUI be it X11 or Wayland, the resource usage is I would think on the order of 1% as much, and maybe less.

iberator

5 hours ago

hehe it looks like DESQview]1] for MSDOS from 1985 :) Amazing idea!

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

nickdothutton

4 hours ago

I was a user of DESQview and DESQview/X. It was like having a superpower. Especially in the days of very expensive UNIX workstations (which I could no way afford).

Borg3

4 hours ago

While I love CLI and terminals this is like going backward, heh. Instead of making lightweight and lighting fast GUIs where you can render all your terminals and some other graphics, people try to form TUIs again.

Yeah, they were great in 80s where HW was seriously underpowered. I run minimal IceWM and it looks and works great, and its quick :)

nunobrito

3 hours ago

What are the key commands to use this TUI?

Don't find details and trying the usual suspects didn't work.

Also, it was needed to install a missing library: sudo apt install libncursesw5-dev

Protostome

5 hours ago

I like the idea, but almost everyone needs a browser these days... Unless you work solo and don't need MS Teams/Google Meet/etc

sebtron

4 hours ago

There's browsh, a version of Firefox that renders in a terminal: https://www.brow.sh/

nxobject

2 hours ago

That's wonderful – I have a VPS where disk space is a premium; I'd rather stick to the terminal for any required browsing than install a minimal graphical environment on disk!

(A note to Ubuntu users that browsh is incompatible with the default snap distribution of Firefox; you'll have to install it from a PPA.)

znpy

an hour ago

does it do session management (like screen/tmux, meaning i can detach from a session and reattach later) or do i have to run it in screen?

curtisszmania

9 hours ago

This is pretty slick! I can already see myself nodding in approval. It’s like having a tmux session but on steroids—minimalism at its finest. For anyone who loves their terminal, this feels like the ultimate upgrade.

lproven

2 hours ago

I agree.

I can imagine multiple use cases...

* A complete multiwindow console environment you can access locally or over an SSH session

* An extremely low-resource multi-app session for very low-end devices, such as a Raspberry Pi Zero or the like, where you have under a gigabyte of RAM

* A very fast very low-resource environment for a console-only server that happens to have a big hi-res LCD attached

* I am less sure but this could potentially be highly accessible for users with low vision or users of screenreaders.