Re: FVWM: FVWM on a high density screen -> FvwmForm

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