Colin,
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Theoretically, I suppose an ncurses
version could eventually be written, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Modern word processors are *very* GUI-intensive, and AbiWord is no
exception.
While AbiWord was designed from the ground up to be highly portable to
various GUIs, we put zero design effort into ensuring that it'd run on
non-graphical UIs. In particular, the XP code tends to assume that what's
sitting on the other side of various APIs is a modern GUI which can draw
lines, images, text, not to mention raising context menus, etc.
I suppose someone *could* port AbiWord to ncurses (or, shudder, DOS) by
stubbing out anything too graphically intensive. The word gruesome comes to
mind, but hey, my memories of WordStar and VT100s are less than fond. I'm
not planning to try it this lifetime, but if someone comes up with one, I'd
love to see what they had to do to get it working. :-)
When it comes to Open Source, I never say never, because it's hard to
predict what some hacker somewhere on the planet will decide is worth their
while.
Paul,
GUI hacker