On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 05:44:10PM -0400, Dan Espen wrote: > I had a lot of experience with IBM ISPF panels. > I wanted to model FvwmForm along those lines. > That's were the data reading and saving came from.
That's amazing! I really don't know anything about IBM's early software. The closest I ever got was Rational Rose, back when RUP was popular (early 2000s i when I was exposed to that at University). Needless to say I've not been involved with any commercial companies which have used IBM. I've just watched a Youtube video which highlighted ISPF Panels. I can now really appreciate why you were going down that route. What a lot of fun! > For tables, ISPF lets you say something like here is a line but the line is a > model > for a table. So, when you design an ISPF table it's a lot like > FvwmForm's LINE. You put a bunch of fields on a line with the > understanding that the data determines how many times the line is > repeated when displayed. Right -- I think I understand this. I'm basing a lot of this from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA3rvZwU7e8 Is this what you're referring to, Dan? > With FvwmForm, you'd say, here is a line that should be displayed in > a box 10 lines high. So, for example, with FvwmForm's implementation > of FvwmTalk, where it shows the last error line, instead you'd say > I want to show up to the last 10 error lines. OK. > ISPF itself handles things like scrolling the data if the data is > bigger than the display area. > > So, that's the table part. It's really interesting. Just on the mentioned video above, the style looks similar to a lot of terminal libraries which golang has (one such example would be: https://github.com/gizak/termui). I appreciate we're talking about X11 here, but it's still not to see that in 2020, people are becoming more invested in the terminal and CLIs than they perhaps used to. > I had the idea that FvwmForm could display a table of lines, > let you add or delete lines, or select a line. > When you select a line you'd see another table of the fields > on the line. I really like this idea. I wonder though how heavy this would be on window resize? It might flicker through redraws if we're not careful. > Glad to hear it. > Fvwm is still pretty far from being able to configure itself. > I did some work along those lines with FvwmAnimate and FvwmForm-Form > but didn't get far enough. Well, it's back: https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/commit/6e65b85d127de9b18022c8073974c2f3745b14a1 Kindly, Thomas
