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What is the best GUI to use within DOS?

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barney

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Currently, I use a GUI called "Quick Menu" and like it a lot. Are there any other good GUI's out there that are just as good, if not better than "Quick Menu"? Thanks.

Barney
 
barney said:
Currently, I use a GUI called "Quick Menu" and like it a lot. Are there any other good GUI's out there that are just as good, if not better than "Quick Menu"? Thanks.
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DOSSHELL. You can launch it from MS DOS 6.22. I believe IBM DOS has a similar functionality. Obviously these are not true GUIs: Windows is a true GUI. :D
 
Chuck(G) said:
Are either of those true GUIs? I thought both were text-mode menus.
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Yeah, I think he's just misusing the term "GUI"... Those are just text mode menus. But whatever, they're sort of an interface. I remember using some kind of menu system - it was this program that generated nice looking textmode menus for stuff. I want to say it was Crystal Menu or something like that. It's been a LONG time. Had it set up on the hard disk so you could run the menu and select common programs and tasks, one of which was "run game", which just ran a:\go.bat - all the games were on floppy disks (not nearly enough room on the hard drive), so I just had all of them with a go.bat file on the disk, so it would launch whatever game was contained therein.

-Ian
 
I use Norton Commander. Not really a GUI, but it is a shell. And it has a menu system built into it that is very easily customized.
 
Not a true GUI either, but I've always been a huge fan of Xtree -- there's a lot of things Xtree Gold could do that I wish modern GUI's could handle...

... and there were a good number of true GUI for DOS other than windows Chuck - GEM, GeOS, Deskmate, Desqview X, Quacker...

Quacker -- hey, anyone still have a copy of that? Turned a DOS PC into a "quackintosh". (even had a little picture of a duck where the apple logo would go on the menu)

There are a few new contenders too - SEAL, Access, Ozone, etc... Though I think SEAL is defunct since it's not seen a real update in like a decade.
 
Um.. Windows. Truly though it depends on your hardware and what version of DOS. Certainly GUIs and shells are good but require higher dos versions to work.
 
Note: There's also another similar thread here that's worth reading...

The Graphics Menu for DOS

(yes, that's it's full name)

A friend in HS picked it up from Walmart off of one of those registered shareware endcaps that they used to have in the early 90's, selling the Commander Keens, One Must Fall, Jill of the Jungle, etc.

GM was an awesome GUI. Very Windows-like. Full custom menu support, icon-driven (import/edit your own ICO files or use the ones included w/ the system), password-protection on specific icons, pages, or the entire system. Mouse support, everything. I probably should make a screen shot - Quick Menu II was the closest thing I ever found to GM, but it paled in comparison. I used to have about 12 menu pages - one for each family member, a utilities page, several game pages (of which I locked the admin portions of the GM, and locked out the games I had purchased to keep my brother from playing them, as he was fond of refusing to help me purchase games, but quite fond of playing them after I'd purchased them). You could create icons that were shortcut applications, or that pointed to other menu pages. It was quite, quite useful.

The back-end was essentially a batch file, but GM processed these on the fly, creating the batch file and executing it as soon as one clicked on the associated icon - these were not permanently littering your hard drive, however - which was nice, given how much space you can lose with a FAT file system on smaller hard drives.

For all that it did, it's memory footprint wasn't really larger than the competition, either - about 17kb, IIRC - but when things got really tight with the conventional memory, I did finally switch to using HD Menu 4, as it's footprint was a third of that. (it wasn't a gui, much closer to DA or X-Tree in look and function)
 
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My favorite is GEOS-Breadbox Ensemble 4.Runs very well on a 386 and has a lot of applications (including a web browser).
 
I always used to use dosshell, but I ended up writing my own in qbasic. Think qbasic takes too much conventional memory to use as a shell? Think again, I used this dirty trick (along the lines of what Maverick1978 mentioned):

WRAPPER.BAT:
:start
echo set exit=true > runthis.bat
qbasic /run myshell.bas
call runthis.bat
if not "%exit%"=="true" goto start

The qbasic shell writes the program to run to the batch file runthis.bat and then exits, if it wants to run something. If it doesn't the default runthis.bat will break the loop.

I used the same stupid trick in Windows to launch memory heavy DOS programs. Clicking the icon for one of these would launch a little VB program that sets up runthis.bat and then tells program manager to exit. I had way too much time on my hands back then in school.
 
I used XTree Gold and its menuing system and currently use Norton Desktop for Windows to liven up the Win 3.11 desktop. I have used Desqview/X but not lately. I think there is a Norton Desktop for DOS as well.
 
I'm a fan of Quickmenu III. So much so I bought the software. Used GeoWorks 1.2 for a while till a discounted version of Windows 3.1 was available and ended up putting Calmira over the top of that. Desktop/2 isn't bad either, its free along with source code I think.
 
I always liked the approach in that book I have mentioned often, Fully Powered IBM PC. Just pop up a menu, either a text file or a BSAVE file (if you're using an old enough PC, BSAVE is fastest), telling you what key to strike or what batch file to run to do various programs.

For example, if you have 30 games, you could have a batch file called g.bat that takes a number as input, so you could type "g 3" to run Wolfenstein 3d, or if you just type g and press enter, you get a list of all 30 games on your PC. Or with ANSI.SYS, assign "g [enter]" to F3 or something. :)

I have to get my dad's IBM PC out of storage so I can show you guys some of what I had set up on there. :)

--Brian
 
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