Re: curses

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

2009/9/8 Juris Kalnins <juris@mt.lv>:
> On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:50:14 +0300, Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> wrote:
>
>
>> I'm currently rewriting GNU Zile (a lightweight Emacs clone) in Lua,
>> so I need curses support.
>
> You may consider doing it without curses. That library is worthy of it's
> name.

Not in my experience. I've tried with termcap before, but simply ended
up hitting problems that curses has already fixed. Curses is also
standardized in POSIX-2001.

> There is big enough subset of ANSI escape sequences that is well
> supported by all current terminals.

That's nice in theory, but "a big enough subset" is not a documented
standard (though I see that it is documented at least to some degree).

> Terminal emulation bugs are often easy to work around without adding
> specific cases to the code.

And with curses I don't have to.

> See http://vt100.net and http://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html
> for good reference.

Thanks, but with curses I can spend my time writing the application
rather than the terminal interaction. As far as I'm concerned, this is
already a solved problem. (Plus the fact that ncurses's maintainer is
responsive helps.)

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