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cosmos72 / twin

Text mode window environment. A "retro" program for embedded or remote systems, that doubles as X11 terminal and text-mode equivalent of VNC server
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Linux framebuffer support? #36

Open inukaze opened 5 years ago

inukaze commented 5 years ago

Hi there, i love this software. and i had a suggestion like feature request.

You can add Framebuffer Support?

like the "links / links2" web browser, when you run from terminal with

links -g
links2 -g

Distribution name depend. on some are just links in another is links2

Screenshot : tty6.png

And use this for make more graphic the experience. i think if twin can be similar to graphical desktop environment but without x / x11 will be the most recommend option for discontinued hardware.

cosmos72 commented 5 years ago

Hi inukaze, I thought several times in the past about adding framebuffer support, but I never actually resolved to implement it - mostly because Linux console support is very good already and twin does not draw any pixel graphics anyway.

It could make sense if twin supported Unicode much better than the Linux console, but that's an area that still needs to be improved on twin side: it currently only supports UCS-2 i.e. the first 64k Unicode codepoints

inukaze commented 5 years ago

Well, thanks for answer me

cosmos72 commented 5 years ago

To be completely honest, the idea of a desktop environment based on twin and without X11 has a definite "retro" appeal :)

Framebuffer support could help a lot toward such goal - provided that twin is extended with two features:

  1. Pixel graphics, to actually take advantage of the framebuffer
  2. The ability to run multiple graphical programs inside a single twin session - this is what X11 does

[update] using the Sixel bitmap graphics format could be a feasible solution: it's relatively easy to implement, several terminal-based programs can already use it, and it's even appropriately "retro".