A GUI library that is less of a library and more of a binary, with communication done solely through stdin/stdout. A client would spawn iogui as a child process, send a description of what the GUI should look like in a compact TCL-like manner, and iogui will then send back events whenever something happens (e.g. a button was pressed, an input's text was changed).
Given that communication will be done via text, the following limitations will exist:
- No custom widgets or canvas surfaces
- No custom image support
- No video/audio support
- No mouse pointer motion events (at least not by default)
- No custom animations (although "move x to y over n seconds using y function", should be possible)
However, it would have the following features:
- The ability to lose and later restart the GUI by respawning iogui and resending interface data
- The ability to have a DISPLAY-like variable and/or option to change the iogui command
- E.g.
--iogui "ssh me@elsewhere iogui" - Or a special display-less iogui used for automated testing
- Or a grep filter to make buttons disappear (e.g.
--iogui "grep -v dontshowthis | iogui | grep -v dontdothis") - Or a proxy that changes the GUI entirely
- Or a wrapper that saves state and keeps retrying iogui until a display becomes available again
- Or a web-hook to a remote server that stores the GUI and presents it as HTML
- E.g.
- The ability to make complex GUIs in any language with no dependencies, even Bash
- Highly cross-platform