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

[Dirk Munk]

Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 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.

I've worked with FMS too, with RSX and VMS. In fact I was quite good at 
it, I found some tricks to make FMS run much more smoothly. I used the 
pages in non-DEC VT compatible terminals to store forms, so you only had 
to switch to that page, and fill the form with the variables. The form 
itself didn't have to be displayed every time, just once when the 
applications started. I also removed the cursor before filling the form, 
it almost looked like a GUI.

I quite frequently see applications based on a terminal interface (VT or 
IBM), so there are still quite a few of these around. And why not if 
they are adequate for the job.

I'm sure there are many GUI tools around, but at the moment there's 
nothing that is as easily integrated in an application as FMS (or 
perhaps DECforms or TDMS). Furthermore lots of GUI implementations are 
more related to IBM block mode terminals then to VT character mode 
terminals. The user has to fill-in the data, and then click on " Send" 
or something similar to send all the data to the application.

A GUI replacement for FMS would be great, but it just isn't there.

>
> 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.
>