[Lazarus] Startup environment: to Gui, or not to GUI?

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2017-04-11 10:15, Mark Morgan Lloyd via Lazarus wrote:
> Is there an orthodox way that a Lazarus program can very early on look 
> at how it's been started and decide whether it can usefully fall back to 
> a text mode, e.g. to display help info on stdout rather than a messagebox?

In the past I've used a start-up script (unix) or a start-up console app
(unix & windows) to detect the environment, then launch the correct
binary executable. At the time I didn't know what this the "correct" way
of doing this, but I looked for things like x11 in the process list, or
looked at the environment variables (eg: DISPLAY). Under Windows I
simply you always know a GUI exists, but you can still test to see if
stdout is available or now (eg: I have windows GUI apps that output help
to a console or ShowMessage() dialog.).

Regards,
  Graeme

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