Graphical Terminal Environment

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2012-Mar-06 14:08:51 -0500, Brandon Falk <bfalk_bsd at brandonfa.lk> wrote:
>When I mention lines, circles, etc I was thinking moreso at the very low level
>of fonts being drawn by lines and dots (although I would like to branch it
>eventually to support 2d graphics where people could maybe make some 2d games,
>but keep the high-res terminal on the side to keep it minimal). I also may want
>to draw some lines to border terminal windows (screen would eliminate this
>obviously).

If you're looking for something minimal, vector support should be one
of the first things to go.  At small sizes (in terms of dots), the
best fonts are all bitmaps, rather than vector descriptions.  One of
the features of TrueType and Postscript is that a vendor can provide
hand-tweaked bitmap glyphs for small sizes of a vector font.  Likewise
the VT100 demonstrated that you don't need vector line drawing to
draw boxes.

Some points to keep in mind:

Anything beyond what is supported in your VESA BIOS requires custom
support for your specific video chip.  This is part of the code in
x11-drivers/xf86-video-*.

LCD monitors look fairly poor unless driven at their native resolution
so, unless your VESA BIOS provide a mode that suits your monitor, you
will need custom driver code.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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