Re: curses

[Tiago Dionizio <tiago.dionizio@...>]

> I just looked into the state of support for curses. The best I can
> find is lcurses 0.2, which seems basically to be abandonware.

lcurses was more of a hobby of mine and not a project to serve everyone's needs.

It started as binding to most ncurses api, including panels, but later
I began take a different route trying to actually implement a high
level api in Lua using a subset of the curses api.

For that purpose, lua cui was a work in progress - more of a proof of
concept, since it was somewhat hard to work with but the plan was to
improve the api (for cui) once things were in an advanced stage.
http://lua-cui.sourceforge.net/

There (in the svn repository) I included a more recent version of
lcurses.c but I don't remember how much it was improved. But whatever
workarounds existed for PDCurses were removed since the author of
PDCurses fixed them.

The main reason I eventually stopped working on it was because I
wanted to make it work with an easy to use interface without having to
worry about encodings whenever cui/lcurses was used. Meaning that the
same program would work the same in different platforms /
configurations.

With PDCurses it was possible to work with system encoding or in
utf-8, but with ncurses it depended on a lot of things... system
configuration, terminal support (system, screen application, client),
if using ssh/telnet the client had to be properly configured... lots
of things to take into account and some of them would have to be
handled by the (experienced?) user.

Of course, if you only use ASCII then you won't have much problems
with it, but for drawing special characters like boxes or accented
characters it would lead to problems most of the time.

Maybe I was too ambitious, but since it was more of an academic
project it was somewhat abandoned - at least until the next time I
felt like working on it again :)

Feel free to reuse lcurses and make it into something useful.


Regards,
Tiago