Console vs GUI application in Object Pascal - is it either-or?
Console vs GUI application paradigm Console/terminal in POSIX vs in MS Windows Two-in-one with FPC/Lazarus The real magic Console vs GUI application paradigm In short, console application (or terminal mode application) is when you have a command line interface like in the MS-DOS time, or like shell in Linux. Or if you start cmd.exe on Windows. Application dedicated to this scenario prints characters to terminal (stdout) and reads input from the terminal (stdin) when you use standard object pascal routines like write / writeln and read / readln . GUI application is one that produces a window, or many windows, with visual elements like buttons, text input fields, sliders, checkboxes, radio buttons, end so on. Well GUI is actually a generic term, and you can have GUI application in terminal, like for example, FreePascal has a text-mode IDE complete with text editor, and interactive dialog widnows (with buttons and text input) which all work in the terminal, and it works a