jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) (07/29/89)
Just a note to thank the people who answered my questions a month or so ago about good documentation for the curses, termcap, and terminfo packages. It seems that there was only one suggestion, sent to me by quite a lot of people. The O'Reilly & Associates series of Nutshell Handbooks has two books: "termcap & terminfo" by John Strang, Tim O'Reilly and Linda Mui "Programming with curses" by John Strang The capitalization is theirs. Both are quite well written, and I'd suggest that anyone dealing with terminals on a Unix system (;-) get a copy of the both for their own bookshelf. The people I'm working with keep trying to steal my copies... Since you last heard from me, I've written me a new shell whose idea of a "prompt" is a menu, described by a bunch of function calls in the script that's being interpreted. Its syntax is plagiarized from languages like Lisp and Trac (hey, remember Trac?), and treats any executable file as a function whose value is its standard output. Variables displayed correspond to modifiable menu fields; any field may have an expression attached which is evaluated when the user hits the ENTER key, after which the menu is redisplayed, possibly with different values for some fields. It's lots of fun to play with. I don't know why I didn't do it years ago. Well, OK, I do know; I've been busy fighting other fires, and just now got around to it. Maybe I should see if anyone else around the net might be interested. I've heard a lot of complaining about Unix not having a menu-oriented user interface, and not much talk about doing anything about it. If you hear such complaints, you might pass on the word that someone has done something about it, and it wasn't all that difficult, once I found the right manuals. One thing I haven't quite got straight yet is how to portably know when the user has pressed various interesting function keys, such as the HELP key. Although most terminals send the escape sequences in a burst, the program doesn't necessarily get them in a burst. This causes some slightly tricky buffering. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong. There's also the question of how to match against such a list and not gobble up all your cpu in the process, though I guess that's not that big a deal. I did eventually find a copy of the BSD curses manual; as some people warned me, it was rather sketchy and not too useful. Anyway, thanks for all the help, which appeared with almost no flames to speak of. -- #echo 'Opinions Copyright 1989 by John Chambers; for licensing information contact:' echo ' John Chambers <{adelie,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)' echo '' saying
lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) (07/30/89)
Is there a list of the O'Reilly books retrievable by mail server or anonymous FTP anywhere? Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4