WinHugs for GHCi, prompt feature

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 18:55 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:

> Indeed it would, but I fear that in opting for a cross platform
> toolkit like Gtk2Hs it will be impossible to add the final layer of
> polish and system integration that will change this from being useful
> to being a killer application. For example, linking with Gtk2Hs and
> GHC makes the binary 8Mb for hello world

Not true!

At least not true any more. :-)

I added support for GHC's "split-objs" feature to the Gtk2Hs build
system and the size of a striped hello world GUI shrank from 2.7M to
250k. For reference a trivial program (main = print "hello world") is
190k on my system.

This improvement will be included in the next release.

>  - the entire program so far
> is under 100Kb so that puts it in a whole different ballpark. Also
> things like drag and drop of files under Gtk2Hs don't work, and the
> toolbar would not be native, and therefore less pretty :)

Hmm. Drag 'n drop. Yeah we'll have to look into that. I believe it is
supposed to work but we've not made those features available yet. You'll
have to prod us or even better - send us a patch! ;-)

The toolbar should be indistinguishable from a 'native' one because it
uses the native WinXP theme API to do the drawing. Though I notice that
when using the 'clasic' windows theme that it does indeed look a little
different. Someone should file a bug against Gtk+'s windows theme.

> Of course, I am attempting to keep the cross platform bits and the
> user interaction bits separate, so hopefully it will be possible to
> have native ports of the system, but thats a way off yet. Someone has
> expressed interest in porting it to Mac.

Yeah, Gtk+ is still a bit ugly on Mac. There is a company working on
that however so I hope it'll be better in future:

http://developer.imendio.com/wiki/Gtk_Mac_OS_X

They're starting by getting Gtk+ to work without X11 and then getting
the native theme right. This will probably take many months however.

Duncan