+++ /dev/null
-Jexer Work Log
-==============
-
-October 21, 2018
-
-All future work for this project has been moved to GitLab. GitHub
-will remain up for a few months longer, until the next release comes
-out.
-
-September 18, 2018
-
-Collecting up a few bug fixes involving race conditions: message box
-(and input box), TimeoutInputStream, window close. Will get these
-uploaded to GitHub in a little while.
-
-July 13, 2018
-
-This project isn't dead, I swear!
-
-My meatspace life has been very crazy busy. But I do hope to be back
-to work on this in another couple months.
-
-December 15, 2017
-
-We now have 24-bit RGB colors working with Swing backend.
-EMCA48Terminal isn't happy though, let's try to fix that... still no
-dice. So RGB is there for ECMA48 backend, but it sometimes flickers
-or disappears. I'm not sure yet where the fault lies. Ah, found it!
-Cell.isBlank() wasn't checking RGB.
-
-Well, I do say it is rather pretty now. Let's get this committed and
-uploaded.
-
-December 14, 2017
-
-TComboBox is stubbed in, and it was quite simple: just a TField and
-TList, and a teeny bit of glue. Along the way I renamed TCheckbox to
-TCheckBox, which was almost more work than TComboBox. Heh. Things
-are starting to come together indeed.
-
-TSpinner is in. Now working on TCalendar... ...and TCalendar is in!
-
-December 13, 2017
-
-A user noticed that the example code given in the README.md caused the
-main window to freeze when clicking close. Turns out that was due to
-the addWindow(new TWindow(...)) line, which led to TWindow appearing
-in TApplication's window list twice. Fixed the README, and then made
-TApplication.addWindow a package private function plus a check to
-ensure it isn't added twice.
-
-On the home front, my main box is now a Fedora 26 running Plasma
-desktop. That ate a few weekends getting used to. Current-era Linux
-is pretty nice, systemd so far (cross fingers) isn't creating any real
-problems, audio and wifi worked out of the box (thanks to Intel
-chipsets), and I can finally have all of my books and references on
-the same box as dev. So woohoo!
-
-SwingTerminal is getting the insets wrong, which is a bit aggravating.
-So let's add adjustable insets in SwingComponent with a default
-2-pixel border around the whole thing, which I can tweak for my
-laptop. Done!
-
-Alright, so where are we? Well, I will have some time in the evenings
-over the next couple weeks to put into projects. This one will get a
-little bit of love, probably a new widget or two; Qodem might get
-libssh2 + mdebtls support in Windows if those aren't too involved;
-Jermit will get a little more push towards a Kermit implementation.
-
-October 17, 2017
-
-I finally gave up the ghost on using gcj as the default compiler due
-to its awesome unused imports messages, and learned how to get PMD to
-do that job. Which promptly created 1000+ warning messages related to
-class item order (variables, constructors, methods), nested ifs,
-useless checks, and so on. So now we go on a code sweep to fix those,
-and along the way set a new class template. Since this is so large
-and invasive, I will bite the bullet now and get it done before the
-next release which will get it out on Maven finally.
-
-August 16, 2017
-
-Holy balls this has gotten so much faster! It is FINALLY visibly
-identical in speed to the original d-tui: on xterm it is glass
-smooth. CPU load is about +/- 10%, idling around 5%.
-
-I had to dramatically rework the event processing order, but now it
-makes much more sense. TApplication.run()'s sole job is to listen for
-backend I/O, push it into drainEventQueue, and wake up the consumer
-thread. The consumer thread's run() has the job of dealing with the
-event, AND THEN calling doIdles and updating the screen. That was the
-big breakthrough: why bother having main thread do screen updates? It
-just leads to contention everywhere as it tries to tell the consumer
-thread to lay off its data structures, when in reality the consumer
-thread should have been the real owner of those structures in the
-first place! This was mainly an artifact of the d-tui fiber threading
-design.
-
-So now we have nice flow of events:
-
-* I/O enters the backend, backend wakes up main thread.
-
-* Main thread grabs events, wakes up consumer thread.
-
-* Consumer thread does work, updates screen.
-
-* Anyone can call doRepaint() to get a screen update shortly
- thereafter.
-
-* Same flow for TTerminalWindow: ECMA48 gets remote I/O, calls back
- into TTerminalWindow, which then calls doRepaint(). So in this case
- we have a completely external thread asking for a screen update, and
- it is working.
-
-Along the way I also eliminated the Screen.dirty flag and cut out
-calls to CellAttribute checks. Overall we now have about 80% less CPU
-being burned and way less latency. Both HPROF samples and times puts
-my code at roughly 5% of the total, all the rest is the
-sleeping/locking infrastructure.
-
-August 15, 2017
-
-I cut 0.0.5 just now, and also applied for a Sonatype repository.
-It was a reasonable spot: TEditor was working albeit buggy, and a bug
-had just come in on the main TApplication run loop. So we are about
-to embark upon some performance work again, it's been probably version
-0.0.2 or so since the last cycle.
-
-Code size: 40446 lines.
-
-Now switching head to 0.0.6 and taking a small break.
-
-August 14, 2017
-
-TEditor is basically done. Mouse movement, keyboard movement,
-backspace / delete / enter / etc. are all in. Things are starting to
-look pretty good.
-
-I'm going to prep for a final cut and release tag tomorrow or the next
-evening. I need to take a break and get some meatspace life dealt
-with.
-
-August 12, 2017
-
-TEditor is stubbed in about 50% complete now. I have a Highlighter
-class that provides different colors based on Word text values, but it
-is a lot too simple to do true syntax highlighting. I am noodling on
-the right design that would let TEditor be both a programmer's editor
-(so Highlighter needs to have state and do a lexical scan) and a word
-processor (where Word needs to tokenize on whitespace). I estimate
-probably a good 2-4 weeks left to get the editor behavior where I want
-it, and then after that will be the 0.0.5 release.
-
-Finding more minor paper cuts and fixing them: the mouse cursor being
-ahead of a window drag event, SwingTerminal resetting blink on new
-input, prevent TWindow from resizing down into the status bar.
-
-August 8, 2017
-
-Multiscreen is looking really cool! Demo6 now brings up three
-screens, including one that is inside a TWindow of a different
-application.
-
-August 7, 2017
-
-Had trouble sleeping, what with a bunch of imaginative thoughts for
-this release. jexer.backend will be the ultimate destination for
-jexer.session and most of jexer.io. TerminalReader will be the
-interface for keyboard and mouse events. cmScreenConnected and
-cmScreenDisconnected will be new events to represent a screen
-appearing/disappearing, and MultiBackend will be a new backend
-multiplexer that goes full XRandR. Several new demos demonstrating
-multi-screen support will be coming along.
-
-August 6, 2017
-
-Time to clean up more API, particularly between Backend and Screen.
-Both of these will be interfaces soon, so that one could easily
-subclass JComponent and implement both Screen and Backend. The
-original code evolved out of Qodem, where screen.c and input.c were
-two different things leading to ECMA48Screen and ECMA48Terminal, but
-now there is really no need to keep them separate. It also
-complicates the constructors, as these are basically friend classes
-that have used package private access to get around their artificial
-separation.
-
-When I get this done it should be a lot easier to do any of:
-
-* Pass a JFrame or JComponent to SwingBackend and have it add itself,
- like any other Swing widget.
-
-* Construct a SwingBackend and add it to any regular JComponent.
-
-* Have multiple TApplications running inside the same Swing
- application, including having actions affect each other. (Will also
- need to ensure that TWidgets/TWindows are not in different
- TApplication collections.)
-
-* Build a Backend/Screen multiplexer, so that one could have a ECMA48
- TApplication listening on a port and a local Swing monitor for it.
-
-* Build a Backend/Screen manager, so that one could have multiple
- ECMA48 screens acting as a single large screen (e.g. XRandR).
-
-Now I need to decide which package will collect Backend, SessionInfo,
-and Screen. jexer.io has some java.io stuff, so it stays anyway.
-
-July 28, 2017
-
-Got very busy with my meatspace life, now getting a chance to come
-back around.
-
-I gave up on TEditor knowing about graphemes, instead pulling back to
-simple Cells. This will be better anyway in the long run, as getting
-grapheme support in Screen someday will also get it for me in TEditor
-for free. But it does mean that TEditor will chew through much more
-RAM than it needs to for a text file. Performance optimization will
-come someday. But this means I can also go back to gcj, because I
-really like its warnings about unused imports.
-
-I've got a POM stubbed in, and created an account over at sonatype.
-If it isn't too hard, I will try to get 0.0.5 released into the maven
-universe. But that is still a bit away, I need TEditor running with
-syntax highlighting first.
-
-July 17, 2017
-
-Focus-follows-mouse is in, as is NOCLOSEBOX.
-
-July 15, 2017
-
-I think I have cleaned up most of the window show/hide/activate mess
-in TApplication. Demo4 has some cool interactions between a
-background TDesktop and several foreground TWindows, which helped
-expose bugs.
-
-July 9, 2017
-
-While working on TWindow.hide/show I decided that I am sick of
-TApplication's active window handling. TApplication makes lots of
-assumptions, things are too fragile between modal and not, and one
-cannot easily say window.activate(). So I will also be changing that
-too. ... Code is still a bit of a mess, but hooks are in place at
-least for show/hide/activate.
-
-July 8, 2017
-
-Qodem 1.0.0 released last month, I had a vacation, and a Jexer user
-(nikiroo) started opening up pull requests. :-) So back unto the
-breach we go!
-
-TButton is now animated so that there is some feedback when selected
-via keyboard. StringJustifier was written which permits TText's to
-have left/centered/right and full justification. TDesktop is now in
-too which can act as a permanent max-sized window without borders.
-
-Next up is Viewport, an interface to collect scrollbar API, and then a
-cleaner API for scrollable widgets and windows. After that is more
-window API: hide/show/maximize/restore, and unclosable windows. I am
-cherry-picking bits from @nikiroo's PRs, which will likely break them
-before it fixes things, but I will find some way to get Niki credited
-with those pieces.
-
-March 21, 2017
-
-I am starting to gear up for making Jexer a serious project now. I've
-created its SourceForge project, linked it back to GitHub, have most
-of its web page set up (looks like Qodem's), and released 0.0.4. And
-then this morning saw an out-of-bounds exception if you kill the main
-demo window. Glad I marked it Alpha on SourceForge...
-
-Yesterday I was digging around the other Turbo Vision derived projects
-while populating the about page, and made a sad/happy-ish realization:
-Embarcadero could probably get all of them shut down if it really
-wanted to, including Free Vision. I uncovered some hidden history in
-Free Vision, such that it appears that Graphics Vision had some
-licensed Borland code in it, so there might be enough mud in the air
-that Free Vision could be shut down the same way RHTVision was. But
-even worse is the SCOTUS ruling on Oracle vs Google: if APIs are
-copyrighted (regardless of their thoughts on fair use), then any
-software that matches the API of a proprietary project might find
-itself subject to an infringement case. So that too could shut down
-the other API-compatible TV clones.
-
-Fortunately, Jexer (and D-TUI) is completely new, and has no API
-compatibility with Turbo Vision. Jexer could be a new root to a whole
-generation of TUI applications.
-
-March 18, 2017
-
-TStatusBar is working, as is "smart" window placement. Overall this
-is looking quite nice. Found a lot of other small paper cut items and
-fixed them. It looks absolutely gorgeous on Mac now.
-
-Tomorrow I will get to the public wifi and get this uploaded.
-
-Time to call this 0.0.4 now though. We are up to 32,123 lines of
-code.
-
-March 17, 2017
-
-Jexer is coming back to active development status. I had a lot of
-other projects ahead of it in the queue, mostly Qodem but also Jermit
-and of course lots of actual day job work keeping me too tired for
-afterhours stuff. But here we are now, and I want to get Jexer to its
-1.0.0 release before the end of 2018. After that it will be a
-critical bit of function for IWP and NIB, if I ever get those going.
-I need to re-organize the demo app a bit so that it fits within 80x25,
-and then get to TStatusBar.
-
-A status bar will be an optional part of TWindow. If it exists, then
-it will be drawn last by TApplication and get events routed to it from
-TWindow's event handlers. This will have the nice effect that the
-status bar can change depending on which window is active, without any
-real extra work on TApplication's part.
-
-Putting together a proper TODO now, with release and regression
-checklists. I think I will see if jexer is available at SourceForge,
-and if so grab it. Perhaps I can put together some good Turbo Vision
-resources too. At the very least direct people to the Borland-derived
-C++ releases and Free Vision.
git://git.nikiroo.be / fanfix-jexer.git / commitdiff