[Info-vax] Last Call for (New) DEC VT Terminals

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-06-30 20:10:38 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

> How about FMS based applications?

FMS and TDMS and DECforms are necessary for legacy applications, but 
I'd not expect much in the way of new command line interfaces, much 
less much new work with those tools.

It's rare to see much screen management on most development- and 
operations-related tools intended for the command line, too.

Having used it, FMS is exceedingly primitive compared with some of the 
more modern GUI tools that are now available.   Compared with FMS, the 
GUI Interface development tools and libraries have improved in the past 
~25 years, after all.

As for command line work, I'm very rarely ever doing fancy terminal 
displays for serial interfaces, and — if I were — using ncurses for 
command-line and curses if that's all that's available, or using Qt or 
maybe GTK+ for portable GUI work, would be typical.   Current versions 
of these tools are not available on OpenVMS, when last I checked.    
These are all more effort than the tools for native interfaces, too — 
using the native GUI tools generally provides the best results.    The 
bx and long-deprecated VUIT would the the closest GUI-development 
analogs on OpenVMS, but it's been a very long time since I've seen 
either of those being used anywhere.

Again: it's very rare to see the command line used, outside of 
development and operations and troubleshooting, and outside of the 
context of existing (and usually very old) applications.  New user 
interface work is almost always GUI based, even if there's an 
underlying command interface available for scripting or related tasks.

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