[Lazarus] Displaying Tree Data from a Shell/Terminal command in a TListView [Linux Debian]

[Aruna Hewapathirane]

On Sun, Nov 27, 2022 at 5:06 AM wkitty42--- via lazarus <
lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:

> On 11/26/22 8:24 PM, Aruna Hewapathirane via lazarus wrote:
> > After asking for help on the Lazarus forum  I twiddled with the font
> size and
> > then it displayed the tree lines perfectly but I would like to know if
> there is
> > a way to do this using a TListView without having to be stuck with a
> Monospace
> > font and a specific font size?
>
> no, there is not really any way to do this without using a monospace
> font...
> terminals are monospace by design... their resolutions are represented by
> the
> cols*rows of their characters... eg: 80*24, 80*43, 132*24, 132*43...
>

Oh I miss those days... DOS and Clipper 5.3 and VGA monitors that had a
maximum
resolution of 640 x 480 px and tape drives.

>
> each character is in a cell that has a fixed width and height... some
> common
> cell sizes are 9*12, 9*14, 9*16, 6*12... these are not pixels, though...
> pixels
> were not a thing when these were designed... they are basically dots in a
> raster
> cell... these cells are what are counted for terminal resolutions because
> each
> cell holds one character and terminals are character based, not pixel
> based...
>

You know  I was just thinking with support like this you just cannot go
wrong :-)

>
> not only do you have the vertical spacing but also the horizontal... note
> in
> your image that your column spacing is off so that needs to be fixed,
> too...
> note how your proportional spacing image cannot properly align the columns
> of
> information... FSTYPE, FSVER, LABEL, UUID, FSAVAIL, FSUSE%, and
> MOUNTPOINT...
>

Yes,  that was actually fixed when I started using the Monospace font.

>
> if you are going to replicate the output of a terminal on a graphic
> canvas,
> monospace fonts are the best and easiest way... especially if you are
> going to
> easily deal with tabular output and column alignment... this because you
> don't
> have to do any extra work to get everything aligned properly...
>

Very true and thank you I had to find this out the hard way :-)

>
> then there's the aesthetics... personally speaking, seeing, for example,
> the
> UUID column in proportional font would drive me bananananananananas...
> columnar/tabular data is meant to be displayed in a fixed width format...
> proportional fonts simply cannot properly do that...
>

Yes, very true and agreed.

Thank you wkitty42.

Aruna



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