iuster@blowfly.i88.isc.com (Dan F. Iuster) (11/11/89)
Need info on sources of "curses" libraries and associated "terminfo" or "termcap". They can be either PD or commercial. Commercial may be better since they are probably supported. Has anybody used curses on a PC, and if so what are your impressions ? I need to write a program that would be easily ported between UNIX SVR3 and DOS (no flames please). Thanks, -- Dan Iuster iuster@laidbak.i88.isc.com (708) 505-9100 x322 Interactive Systems, Corp.
ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (11/11/89)
In article <1989Nov10.170403.1312@i88.isc.com> iuster@i88.isc.com (Dan F. Iuster) writes: >Need info on sources of "curses" libraries and associated >"terminfo" or "termcap". They can be either PD or commercial. >Commercial may be better since they are probably supported. > >Has anybody used curses on a PC, and if so what are your >impressions ? I need to write a program that would be >easily ported between UNIX SVR3 and DOS (no flames please). There is a PD version of curses for the PC (pccurses, It should be available in the simetel20 archives). For reasonably low price, I got Aspen's Scientific CURSES/PC, which includes technical support. This is a full implementation on SysVR3 curses, with some extensions. Best of all, they have a library called FORMATION which calls curses routines. FORMATION allows you to use menus of various types (Lotus, pop-ups, pull-downs) without much work. FORMATION and CURSES/PC are offered as MS/DOS (and OS/2) binary libraries and in source code (allowing you to compile FORMATION in your UNIX system). So far, I got the binary versions of both. If things work out, I'll soon get the source code for FORMATION and bring things to SysV. My experience is limited so far, I've just started developing a piece of software that I want to keep portable. Aspen promises in their manuals that everything should run under SYSV curses. I am not sure how it would do with older (BSD) curses libraries. I am betting it should be possible with a few ifdef's. Under MS/DOS the demos look impressive. It looks ideal for a text-based application. I wish it included a few extra tools, like code for an editor you could graft into your application. There is a non-curses alternative which I know only from adds. Oakland C Tools has a package called C-scape which apparently reimplements all the screen management functions. They offer versions for MS-DOS, OS/2, UNIX, Xenix and others. They claim it should be portable almost everywhere.