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<== Date ==> | <== Thread ==> |
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Subject: | Re: Idea for new Display Manager |
From: | "Mooney, Tim M." <[email protected]> |
To: | "Armstrong, Whitney R." <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> |
Date: | Tue, 27 Feb 2018 19:23:53 +0000 |
caQtDM works well for us, and it has some important advantages over MEDM. Users love being able easily to zoom and pan plots, we can write custom widgets much more easily than we could have with MEDM.
Tim Mooney ([email protected]) (630)252-5417
Beamline Controls Group (www.aps.anl.gov) Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Whitney R. Armstrong <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2018 11:53:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Idea for new Display Manager Hello,
My recent experience with display managers left me with the conclusion that a new DM is desperately needed. Here is a quick recap of my experiences and thoughts dealing with the different display managers. Note I am using the latest Ubuntu and Epics base-7 and my comments are tongue-in-cheek. 1. MEDM : It works! This old gem works (almost) perfectly. It has a very easy to use interface, but of course, is rather limited. 2. edm : Where do I download it? The webpage is broken. (Last documentation update was in 2007: is also not a good sign.) 3. caQtDM: A home rolled build system is never a good sign. It compiles but then crashes when launched. I get a horrible hand cramp trying to debug things because who types "caQtDM" with ease? Does it work... I don't know... maybe? 4. CS-studios: First I follow the instructions on the website: fails. Eclipse cannot install all the needed parts. Next I try running maven to build from the core directory. After maven downloads the entire internet the build fails with some horrible java errors. (Why is java still a thing?) CSS looks nice from all the pictures but it has some bugs (or undocumented features). Anyway, if I missed any DMs please let me know. As you can tell, IMO MEDM is still the winner. The idea for a new display manager is to use an "immediate mode" gui (imgui) design which is much easier than "retain mode" like qt, gtk, etc. I have been playing around with Dear ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) which has become quite popular. A test using ImGui and looks for PVs from the example ioc app can be found here https://github.com/whit2333/imgui_DM . My initial take away: It was easier to develop my own DM than build most of the existing display mangers. I am not sure if this speaks to the awesomeness of Dear ImGui, or the sad state of existing DMs (but not you MEDM, you are my rock). In summary, I would like to develop a new display manager around Dear ImGui and any feedback or comments on the idea would be great. Cheers, Whit PS This repo was super useful (https://github.com/mdavidsaver/cmake4epics) and cmake could make life easier by replacing many parts of the -- let's say, unique -- "Epics build system". |