Re: File descriptor question

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:33:26 +0100
Bernd Eggink <monoped@sudrala.de> wrote:

> Neither. I didn't tell what I'm driving at because I didn't want to
> be laughed at by the whole list... But anyway, here is the story:
> 
> Some months ago I started learning Lua, just to keep my old brain 
> working, and because I had fallen in love with the language. Since
> then I have been looking for a really simple and flexible UI which
> doesn't require the user to learn about 512 functions in order to
> create a simple "Save? yes/no/cancel" dialog. Some day, when I
> remembered that xterm is capable to report mouse events, the idea hit
> my mind that it should be possible to write a semi-graphical UI based
> on nothing but xterm and Lua. It sounds crazy, but I simply *had* to
> try it out. And it turned out to be in fact possible: I can now
> create buttons, dialogs, text inputs etc. using an xterm as canvas.
> As a side effect, I learned a lot about Lua (and also about xterm).
> When the thing is presentable, I could post a link here, in case
> anybody is interested.

Bernd,

Yeah, you'll get laughed at. I get laughed at all the time for wanting
to do similar things. If you want to start making these xterm/bash
programming components, one at a time, I'll help you.

Read the following to see what people laughed at me for:

* http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200801/200801.htm

* http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200802/200802.htm

Note that I already have a Lua version of UMENU that we can modify, if
necessary, to do the menu part of what you're talking about. The
recordpicker and filepicker components I wrote in C, and they're
currently somewhat buggy, but it would be pretty easy for me to rewrite
them in LuaJit compatible Lua, in which case they'd be quick enough for
scrolling.

Where I had trouble was in writing a screen-creator program, complete
with entry and exit routines for each field. If both of us put our
heads together, maybe we could come up with it.

Finally, perhaps we could make a template driven application maker. If
we do all of that, the end result will be a Bash-based Rapid
Application Development environment with which any old non-programmer
can make a 4 table CLI CRUD application, with reports, in one day. From
there, I could probably make a conversion program to turn it into a GUI
program, and maybe another conversion program to turn it into a web
app, always assuming that we find a way to put statefulness into the
web app. Most people would call it a prototyper, but the finished app
could be used in production.

If we were to complete this thing, we could make money with it. In the
past I've been called in to make a quick (five days) prototype of an
app that their "real programmers" were going to take months to
complete. My ego was bruised, because they always replaced my
"prototype", but I laughed all the way to the bank.

By the way, does anyone know if Lua has a built-in nCurses module? That
would help to some degree.

And one more thing Bernd:  I'm not laughing!

Thanks

SteveT