looking for a light weighted library/tool to write simple GUI above the text based application

[Paul Boddie]

On 25 Jan, 22:06, "Lorenzo E. Danielsson"
<danielsson.lore... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What you need then is something like SVGAlib (http;//svgalib.org). Only
> really old people like myself know that it exists. I've never heard of
> any Python bindings for it, but that might be where you come in. I
> haven't looked at SVGAlib for years, and I'm not sure about the state of
> the video drivers. I suggest you look at that first.

I believe that SVGAlib was superseded by GGI and other projects, and I
recall that SVGAlib was considered to be something of a nightware with
respect to how it handles various resources. Certainly, I haven't been
very impressed by the behaviour of software using it.

> You could also look at GGI (http://ggi-project.org). GGI has different
> output targets. IIRC, one of them is directfb. To tell you the truth
> I've never really used GGI. There seems to be a python wrapper for GGI,
> although it is fairly old. Maybe you could look at the code for some ideas.

I've had to build software using GGI, and the biggest problem has been
getting packages for it. That said, it seemed to work fairly
acceptably once built and installed. Meanwhile, some people favour
Allegro [1] for this kind of work, and I've been confronted with newly
developed software which uses Allegro, so it's arguably in a different
maintenance state than something like SVGAlib or GGI.

> You should also be able to compile SDL to be able to use directfb as a
> target. If your libSDL handles it, then that should apply to wrapper
> libraries as well, including pygame. I've never tried running SDL apps
> this way, but if it works well, that would probably be your 'best' option.

I'd agree with these sentiments; SDL seems to be the best supported
technology of this kind in the Python universe, and one of the most
widely deployed in general; I've felt quite comfortable building
software against it. It would be very interesting to see whether a
framebuffer-based SDL could support Pygame, and I imagine that the
Pygame mailing list might already have some answers in its archives on
this topic.

Paul

[1] http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/