Can you force a console app to look like a gui app?

Question

我一直在权衡制作gui应用程序的优点/缺点，并且我决定控制台应用程序对我的计算器的功能要强大得多，尤其是因为它可以执行箔纸，二次方程式等不同的功能。所以我的问题是控制台看起来像基于GUI的应用程序？

Answer 1

The answer to your question depends on exactly what you mean by "console." If you're talking about Windows console windows, then the answer is "maybe." Some Windows installations can emulate VGA/EGA graphics within a console window, making them able to play old games for DOS.

Your mission would be to implement every GUI widget you need, such as clickable buttons, text-entry fields, etc. in terms of simple graphics primitives for drawing lines and rectangles. Then you have to write code that figures out where the mouse is and draws the mouse pointer in the right spot. You'd also have to write code to make the cursor blink, to make the arrow keys move the cursor, and to make it possible to select characters in a text entry box and copy, cut, and paste them.

When you got done, you'd have a program that works on some people's computers, but not on others. On some Windows installations, the console windows can't do graphics or go fullscreen. Your app wouldn't work at all on those systems, although you could write a fullscreen Windows app using a 2D game library such as SDL or Allegro instead of writing a console app, which would bring you back to the previous paragraph.

As you might have guessed by now, rolling your own GUI would be a whole lot more work than writing a Windows GUI program in which the buttons, text fields, etc are already implemented for you, the cursor already blinks, the mouse already clicks, etc.

Also, the code that does the actual calculations should be totally separate from the code that gets the input from the user and puts the answers on the screen, so that code shouldn't factor into whether you want to write a GUI or a console app. They shouldn't even be in the same .cpp file as the I/O routines.

Now, some programmers use the term "console" to refer to xterm windows on Linux. These are not the same thing at all, and cannot draw graphics (and "console" is the wrong name for them to boot). But sometimes you see menus and stuff within them, "drawn" with colored text. Usually, these are drawn and managed using the external dialog shell command.