[squeak-dev] Dual screen?

Robert Withers robert.withers at pm.me
Fri Jun 26 17:55:53 UTC 2020


Hi tim,

Thinking about what you have said. Host windows. Mmm... I don't disagree 
with you about the immersive environment of squeak managing the windows.

I am thinking that TruffleSqueak would make a good window manager. I 
think you could use Java Swing to build your host windows. Is it so? 
Good for production apps. Get the tree lists right and you should be 
good to go.

I would rather see Professional Spec widgets, that look & feel like host 
widgets, but managed inside Squeak. A step back from the dynamism of 
Morphic. With all the animation and graphics work and sound/speech, I 
don't see why host look & feel could not be hosted within Squeak. Of 
course, all OS styles should be configurable, so on Windows you could 
switch to Mac windows or Ubuntu look&feel. The issue is time. I wholly 
understand that!

Is that how a squeak display is used? I am unfamiliar. But that sounds 
like a window manager to me! Multiple Displays. Now this proposal of 
yours to use a Project for each Display, seems to interleave with my 
proposed ERights Vat and event loop. I was thinking whether each window 
event loop could feed the Vat event loop. The Vat's event loop already 
comes in as priority 40 or 30, so very background. Like a bubbling 
spring, I like to think.  A Project sounds like a good boundary, to me. 
I believe each Project can establish its own naming environment. Is it so?

I am very interested in forming a Secure DNS, with hierarchical naming 
and local caching. I want to use it as an interface registry, as well, 
such that the ASN1 structure definitions are so shared. ASN1Modules are 
kinda hierarchical, but not completely. For example, I do not think I 
implemented any way to search up and down the tree, for a definition. I 
have further thoughts on auto deploying consumers for the various event 
structures, that may appear unexpectedly, so the engine would dyno-load 
the consumer package registered for that event type.

Closer to my heart, at this point are my questions and request for help 
in splitting off a pruned stack for an exception, to unblock the event 
loop yet still allow introspection of an error, or a halt. Here is what 
I wrote. Tim, might you be able to advise me here? *lost*

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2020-June/210452.html

Kindly,
Rabbit

On 6/26/20 12:54 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:
>
>
>> On 2020-06-26, at 9:35 AM, Robert Withers via Squeak-dev <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org> wrote:
>>
>> Is there a way to set Squeak to be dual screen?
> The fundamentals have been there since 2004. HostWindowPlugin/DisplayHostWindow provide some breadcrumbs.
>
> After years of people shrieking loudly (oh, so loudly) about how essential host windows and native controls are to any chance of Smalltalk having a future - nothing. Nobody found it worth the effort to take the foundation and build on it. That was over 15 years ago.
>
> VisualWorks did the native window thing a long time ago. I've been having to use VW a bit recently (see recent email whining about the awful font stuff) and I really, really, don't like having separate host windows. I think part of the problem is that I tend to have a *lot* of windows open and it turns out that none of the current main OS (yes, I've been using Windows, Mac & various unix) handle lots of windows at all well. It's much easier to have my Squeak world nicely tied together.
>
> One place where I could see potential for interesting experiments would be to use the nascent DisplayHostWindow stuff to do exactly this dual display thing - hell, lots of displays if you want, why not? Instead of trying to make every host window a separate Squeak window, make each a Display and then it you want to spread a couple across several physical display, go for it. Maybe hanging it all off the idea of Projects would be a good start? A Project window already gathers groups of windows after all.
>
> And of course, I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that someone has already done this and that I simply don't remember it...
>
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
>
>
>



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