Welcome to DVX

DVX is a graphical user interface environment for DOS, designed for 486-class hardware and above. It provides a windowing system with a Motif-inspired visual style, cooperative multitasking, and a widget-based application framework.

DVX features include:

A window manager with drag, resize, and minimize support
Over 25 built-in widget types including buttons, lists, and trees
Dynamic application loading via DXE3 modules
Theme support with customizable color schemes

VESA VBE 2.0+ linear framebuffer rendering

System Overview

DVX is built as a five-layer architecture, with each layer providing services to the layer above it.

Video Layer

The video layer (dvxVideo) handles VESA VBE initialization, linear framebuffer mapping, backbuffer allocation, and pixel format detection. It supports 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit color depths.

Drawing Layer

The drawing layer (dvxDraw) provides primitive rendering operations: filled rectangles, beveled borders, text rendering, bitmap blitting, and clipped drawing.

Compositor

The compositor (dvxComp) manages a dirty rectangle list. Only regions that have changed since the last frame are flushed from the system RAM backbuffer to the video card's linear framebuffer.

Window Manager

The window manager (dvxWm) handles the window stack, chrome rendering (title bars, borders, close buttons), drag and resize interaction, focus management, and menu bars.

Application Layer

The application layer (dvxApp) ties everything together with the event loop, mouse and keyboard input, accelerator tables, and the public API used by applications.

Widget System

DVX provides a rich set of widgets (controls) for building application user interfaces. Widgets are loaded as DXE3 plugin modules at startup.

Layout Widgets

VBox -- Vertical box layout (stacks children vertically)
HBox -- Horizontal box layout (stacks children horizontally)
Frame -- Labeled group box with border
ScrollPane -- Scrollable container for oversized content
Splitter -- Resizable split between two panes

TabControl -- Tabbed container

Input Widgets

Button -- Push button with text label
TextInput -- Single-line text entry field
TextArea -- Multi-line text editor with syntax highlighting
Checkbox -- Boolean toggle with label
Radio -- Mutually exclusive option selector
Dropdown -- Drop-down selection list
ComboBox -- Editable dropdown with text entry
Slider -- Horizontal or vertical value slider

Spinner -- Numeric up/down control

Display Widgets

Label -- Single-line text display
Image -- Bitmap image display
ProgressBar -- Visual progress indicator
Canvas -- Custom drawing surface

Separator -- Horizontal or vertical divider line

Data Widgets

ListBox -- Scrollable list of text items
ListView -- Multi-column sortable list with headers

TreeView -- Hierarchical tree with expand/collapse

Keyboard Shortcuts

The following keyboard shortcuts are available system-wide in DVX:

  Shortcut        Action
  --------        ------
  Alt+F4          Close active window
  F10             Activate menu bar
  Ctrl+Esc        Open task manager
  Tab             Move focus to next widget
  Shift+Tab       Move focus to previous widget
  Enter           Activate focused button
  Escape          Close dialog or cancel operation