[Konsole-devel] Konsole Win32 port

[Jarosław Staniek]

Pavel Danchenko said the following, On 2006-10-31 15:47:

> I am thinking about porting Konsole application to native Win32, but I 
> have no idea how to start over.
> I use Gnome on Gentoo Linux, but after installing some KDE applications 
> I discovered also Konsole. I liked it more than Gnome Terminal and now 
> it is the first application, from which I start my work every day. I 
> think it can be a very useful standalone application (as many other 
> parts of KDE, I believe) for developers and administrators and can 
> successfully replace standard Windows cmd. There is the same application 
> called TCI (tabbed console interface) but it is not free and with less 
> features than Konsole.
> So, I would like to hear your opinion about this. If you think, that the 
> idea was useful enough, can you direct me to the starting point?

Pavel, thanks for your interest. I'd recommend to continue the discussion on 
the kde-windows at kde.org and to konsole-devel at kde.org mailing lists. I've CC'd 
this post to both.

I can say for myself that there are two parts of the problem that need to be 
addressed:

1. Konsole port itself
2. Shell port on windows (e.g. sh or bash). Cygwin's works and it's wrapped 
with complex layer of compatibility with GNU tools like bash. There's also 
msys. Reusing these could be a solution. Note that communication with virtual 
terminals is performed on UNIX and on windows it's most probably entirely 
different. Moreover, a few ideas how to deal with terminals (but not how to 
implement a shell) could be available within the famous Putty client[1].

The problem 2 a) could be that if yo udecide to have bash or bash-like shell, 
compatibility with tools that expect cmd.exe's behaviour is lost (yes, it's a 
problem with pathnames and environmen variables separated by ';' instead of 
';"). An example is compilation of the Qt libraries.
Other tools like msvc compiler play nice on bash (e.g. usign Cygwin), however.

I admit having Konsole on windows could be very good thing for me too, 
especially with a shell replacement having cmd.exe-compatibility so I can use 
it for Qt-related development. For now I use Cygwin bash shell where possible, 
but it's only for soon to be outdated Qt3 series.

Since the port could be really popular on win32, you may consider making it 
Qt-only (small download size) and another version that cak be shipped with 
(planned) KDE Development Environment for win32.
After all, Konsole does not benefit very much from using the KDE libraries as 
much as other KDE apps (it of course have all the awesome configuration stuff 
and menu, but it's not related to the main problem of porting the core 
functionality of the app). Tabbed interface is very much the same in Qt-only 
apps as in KDE apps.

[1] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice: http://www.kexi-project.org, http://www.koffice.org
  KDE3 & KDE4 Libraries for MS Windows: http://kdelibs.com, http://www.kde.org