"Walter Bright" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Bill Baxter wrote: >> But it doesn't sound to me like it will be that much use to serious IDEs. > > Possibly not, but for lightweight IDEs I think it would be of much use. It > would also make things very accessible to Emacs and Vim, two very widely > used programmers' editors. > > (One thing I like about Vim is I can run it remotely via putty. A > graphical gui IDE is impractical to use remotely, and yes, I've tried > remote desktops. Unusable.)
A different branch of the this topic started taking about (or rather, bashing on) web-apps-being-used-as-desktop-apps, and I mentioned I felt that was ass-backwards and that the focus should be the other way around: making desktop apps work on the web. What you say here is actually hinting at what I meant: What we need is a proper GUI equivalent to something like TTY or telnet. Not remote desktops, which really just act like streaming video, but something that'll say "Hey client, host here, talking through something much more appropriate than XML/HTTP, I want a button that says 'Ok' at (7,14) with size (50,20) on the form 'FooForm', and if the user wants a skin, may I suggest (but not insist) the 'buttonSkinFoo' that I already sent you earlier, plus I need a user-editable textbox over here...etc." (In fact, I think X11 already provides something like this in a slightly more low-level form) I actually tried doing code-editing through remote desktop a few weeks ago and noticed just how poorly-suited (not to mention unusable) the whole approach was for anything more than clicking around on a few buttons. A fully-loaded Eclipse is vastly more responsive! And why? The client system I was using was perfectly capable of handling a text-box on it's own, and I really didn't need everything to look exactly as it does on the client machine. Video game developers don't make multiplayer games by sending a compressed video stream of the fully-rendered frame - they know that would be unusable. Instead, they just send the minimum higher-level information that's actually needed, like "PlayerA changed direction 72 degrees" (over-simplification, of course). And they send it to a client that'll never insist on crap like interpreted JS or open-for-interpretation standards. And when there's a technology that's inadequate for their needs, like TCP, they make a proper replacement instead of hacking in a half-assed "solution" on top of the offender, TCP. And it works great even though those programs have visuals that are *far* more complex than a typical GUI app. So why can't a windowing toolkit be extended to do the same? And do so *without* building it on top such warped, crumbling, mis-engineered foundations as (X)HTML, Ajax, etc.?
