Win32 Console - Window and Full Screen Modes

Window and Full Screen Modes

A Win32 console application may run in two modes.

One mode places the text in a window and uses an operating system's font rendering. In this mode, an application's interaction with user is controlled by the windowing system. This is analogous to X Window applications like xterm.

In a full screen mode Win32 console uses a hardware text mode and uploads a raster font to the video adapter. This is analogous to a text system console. Full screen uses Windows' built-in VGA driver, rather than any installed graphics drivers, unless another driver is VGA-compatible. Therefore, it only supports VGA-compatible text modes, giving it a maximum character resolution of 80 columns by 28 rows. This contrasts with comparable consoles in various other operating systems such as Linux, which are able to display higher resolutions through different drivers.

An application can be instantly switched between these two modes with Alt-↵ Enter key combination. Text environments in Unix-like systems usually do not have such feature.

Read more about this topic:  Win32 Console

Famous quotes containing the words window, full, screen and/or modes:

    As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one’s bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to bury even one’s head under the cover, giving one’s self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.
    Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)