Re: Scala's got a GUI

Hi Manuel,

This is great!

Very easy to use, and you can also see all the previous screens output.

Especially helpful if you do, say, "show intervals" for a large scale, which
before you had to show one page at a time.

You can show it all in one go.

Also, with View | Scale window, and leaving the scale showing all the time,
it is easy to get a first idea of what all the commands do, just
by trying them out - see what they do to the scale.

Have you thought of making it so that typing the up and down arrow key
in the command line at the bottom of the main window moves you up
and down through the command history (like doskey in MSDOS)?

I notice you can highlight a selection of the text in any of the windows.
It would be nice to be able to copy the text to the clipboard, e.g. using
the windows shortcut Ctrl+C.

Can your multi-platform gui access the Windows clipboard?

One would expect Ctrl + C to work as input for any window with text which
can be highlighted, and to copy the highlighted text from that window.

I see Joseph has asked the same question.

If not, I have a solution that would certainly work.

I'd write a tiny windows program that would send the text to
the clipboard, which you could spawn from within SCALA.

It would be invisible, not show any windows, so the whole thing
would be transparent to the user.

Paste could be done in almost the same way, if needed.

This method could even be used to show the standard Explorer type
Windows dialog for Open and Save to get the file name. Only slight
drawback is that it would require the dialog to be a separate process,
so probably would need to be "always on top", otherwise one would
easily lose it amongst the other windows on the desktop.

Now you can think about providing some graphics output from
SCALA as well!

Look forward to seeing what you do and how you do it.

Robert

could make a little windows app that you could
spawn, with the text saved to a temporary
file (file name passed on the command line), and then it would paste
that text to the clipboard, delete the temporary file, and exit. I could do it so
that it never shows any windows, so that the whole thing would be
transparent to the user.

Could also do one to paste text into scala - when you call it, it
gets the contents of the clipboard, and saves it to a temporary file
(you could pass the name on the command line)
which you can then access in SCALA, and delete.

That way round, SCALA would need to keep checking every
few milliseconds until the temporary file is ready.

Same could be done for other things. E.g. for the standard
Windows File | Open, explorer window, if you can't access
that in SCALA, you could call a tiny windows app that would
call it up, and then when user clicks OK, it would
save the file name as contents of a temporary file which
you could then read in SCALA.

If there is no other way to communicate, one could settle on a
file name that is unlikely to be used, e.g.
3.14159265.OK
or something,
and you keep checking for its presence every twentieth of a second
or something, and when you find it, you know that the Open
window has exited, and can look for the file name. Or if you find
3.14159265.CANCEL, you know that they clicked "Cancel".

I'm not sure whether you can spawn it as a child of your window
so that it is always on top of it, but goes behind other windows.
If not, it could be an "always on top" window, as it isn't so often
that one wants to change to another program while the Open window
is in use.

I could do a single windows app which would do any of those things,
and anything else in windows that you want, just by passing it
various parameters on the command line.

Say if you'd like that.

It would take very little in the way of programming - mostly, some
cut and paste of the relevant code from FTS (which is only a few
lines anyway for most of those things).

Come to think of it, such a windows prog. could also evolve
into a useful freeware app. that programmers more generally could
distribute with their programs to access these things.

I wonder if anyone has done that before, but can't recall seeing it.

Now you can think about providing some graphics output from
SCALA as well!

Look forward to seeing what you do and how you do it.

Cheers,

Robert

Robert wrote:

>Have you thought of making it so that typing the up and down arrow key
>in the command line at the bottom of the main window moves you up
>and down through the command history (like doskey in MSDOS)?

Indeed, this is high on my to-do list.

>Can your multi-platform gui access the Windows clipboard?

I believe so, I also saw things about drag-and-drop, so I will try to
implement this too.
There are some other shortcomings. Once they're resolved I'll think
about graphics output. Thanks for the comments,

Manuel