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

[Chris Mellon]

On Jan 25, 2008 5:17 PM, Paul Boddie <paul at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> 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 I believe that SVGAlib was superseded by GGI and other projects, and I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.
>


I agree that SDL is probably the best choice but for the sake of
completeness, Gtk can (at least in theory - I've never tried it) be
built against directfb and run without X.