[PD-dev] seeking advice on Pd gui overhaul

[Chris McCormick]

Hi Paul,

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 02:43:59PM -0500, Paul Kohlhoff wrote:
> It would be very helpful to us if anyone could offer any suggestions,
> criticism, or comments on this project. Does anyone know of any similar
> projects? What could be some possible issues/consequences?

What we are doing at RjDj is running Pd with "-nogui" in a subprocess of a
Python program, which is the GUI (wxWindows). If you interested in that, the library we are using to abstract out the control of Pd is here:

<http://mccormick.cx/projects/PyPd/>

Once the current work being done by Hans and friends on the modularisation of
the GUI is complete, it should be possible to write custom tcl scripts or
plugins to make the GUI behave a bit more as you need it to. If I was you I
would wait for, or contribute to that work. I feel like re-writing the Pd UI
from scratch in another language or toolkit is a huge undertaking and would
become a bit of a maintenance headache. That is especially true as I have heard
that some parts of Pd internals are actually hard coded to send TCL messages
back to the GUI. I should look at the code to verify that, but I'm going to
stick to my tradition on this list of empty promises[1] and vague, possibly
incorrect claims[2]. ;)

Best,

Chris.

[1] http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2002-07/007233.html
[2] http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2009-05/070416.html

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