Differences between version 7 and previous revision of Curses.
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| Newer page: | version 7 | Last edited on Tuesday, November 2, 2004 2:51:45 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 6 | Last edited on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 12:31:30 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -1,17 +1,9 @@
-Curses is the unix toolkit
for displaying
text based
[GUI]'
s.
+[
Curses]
is an [API]
for writing
text terminal
[GUI]s. It offers operations such as drawing, colouring and removing text, moving the cursor around, and so on. It was devised for scenarios with a terminal connected over a low-speed link (unconfirmed: it grew out of the vi(1) development), and is heavily optimised to send the least number of escape codes necessary to update the screen. This also means that it works well over very laggy [TCP] connections as well. <tt>:-)</tt>
-Curses is used for all sorts of operations on a terminal
, the
most important of which include drawing and removing text, colouring/hilighting text, and moving the cursor around
.
+The [Linux] [Kernel]'s <tt>make menuconfig</tt> interface uses a [
Curses] interface
, as do
most console TextEditor~s
.
-Curses originally grew out of vi(1) I believe
, and was very optimised for sending
the least number of escape codes to update
the screen from the old representation to the new representation, which means that it worked really well over low speed serial. (On the flipside, now it works over very laggy tcp connections really well too :)
.
+On [Linux]
, the [Curses] [API] is implemented by
the [GPL]ed <tt>ncurses</tt> library
.
-Curses has been replaced and rewritten and is usually called "ncurses" now.
-
- make menuconfig
-for instance, uses a Curses interface, as do most text editors.
-
-__ncurses__ is simply an implementation of the curses [API]. ncurses is the implementation used by most [Linux] software - ncurses is under the [GPL] so only GPL-compatible programs may link against it.
-
-From the start of the man page
:
-;__DESCRIPTION__: The ncurses library routines give the user a terminal-independent method of updating character screens with reasonable optimization. This implementation is "new curses" (ncurses) and is the approved replacement for 4.4BSD classic curses, which has been discontinued.
-
-See the
ncurses(3X) man page
for an overview and link
to the other
functions' man pages, or see
[HowToNCURSESProgrammingHOWTO
] for lots of information (including
a good introduction to terminals and ncurses).
+See also
:
+*
ncurses(3X) for an overview and links
to its
functions' ManPage~s
+*
[NCURSES Programming HOWTO | http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/
] -- includes
a good introduction to terminals
