martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) (04/30/91)
TSSIA - has anybody tried this? What I'm thinking of is basically the following: There are numerous applications that doesn't really need a bitmapped terminal but are quite happy with a character oriented display. Using Curses is the library of choice in such situations. If I have for other reasons an bittmaped display with X (in my case I need it because I do a lot of document preparation with it), I can, of course, run curses programs via an xterm-emulator there. But support support for the modern versions of curses is often a limited on X-displays. To give an example: The fonts I got delivered with X (with ISC's X11 implementation) don't include all the fine characters needed for semi- grafics so that curses applications run via xterm look in fact much worse than they would look on any decent character terminal. Further it seems very clumsy to me, packaging relative "hig-level" information into strings of escape-sequences (done by the program linked with the curses library), and do complex decoding of these strings in some other program (the xterm-emulator). The idea that I have is, if possible, to map the logical curses functions into X-calls. I have no experience with writing applications using X (all I did until now was reading two third of Jones' book "Introduction to the X Window System") so I can not at all estimate the efforts needed to implement such an aproach. To clarify again: What I'm looking for is some library that can be linked *instead* of lcurses with any application containing calls to curses-function, so that this application can directly run as X-client without going thru an xterm-emulator. Did anybody allready do this? If not, is anybody interested in a "joint-venture" to try it together with me? I think we could start with negotiating a small subset of curses functions to get simple programs running, later adding step by step what would be neccessary to get more complex programs to work. -- Martin Weitzel, email: martin@mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83