Programming with NCurses

indienick · 07-08-2006, 08:56 PM

I'm really interested in programming with ncurses. I started reading the TLDP HOWTO on ncurses (link).

Unfortunately, as with most things in the Linux/UNIX world, it revolves around C, and my C know-how is practically non-existant *gong sound*.

Is it possible to obtain curses/ncurses libraries for other languages (interpreted or compiled)?
I'm particularily interested in obtaining it for KSH or BASH.

PS. I know BitTorrent (which is written in Python) uses curses, so that leaves me some hope in there being "ports" of it to other languages.

jschiwal · 07-08-2006, 09:18 PM

Is this the ncurses how-to that you are working with. I believe that the Mandrake distro you are using uses perl/ncurses for a lot of the admin scripts. However, you might find C to be easier than Perl! But you have some real world real examples on hand.

---

Just to betray how unschooled I am, is your sig a quote from some work. Look at me, I'm quoting Zippy the pinhead. No wonder I don't recognize the Ukrainian reference.

indienick · 07-08-2006, 09:47 PM

I know Perl quite well, C/C++ not so much, so I'll use Perl::Curses as a last resort, in case I can't find any libraries for including curses with KSH.

Quote:

Just to betray how unschooled I am, is your sig a quote from some work. Look at me, I'm quoting Zippy the pinhead. No wonder I don't recognize the Ukrainian reference.

I'm actually amazed that you recognized it as being Ukrainian!

Unfortunately, the only things I'm quoting are a Ukrainian beer shirt (Я Українець = I am Ukrainian -- the equivalent to Molson Canadian's "I Am Canadian."), and Ющенко. Так. (Yushchenko. Yes.) is me showing my support for the Orange Revolution, by quoting their motto "Так."

PS. Thanks for the response.

jschiwal · 07-08-2006, 10:52 PM

Thanks for the explanation. I used to keep up with politics a couple decades ago. It's been a few years since I watched CSPAN and the Christian Science Monitor Report doesn't air anymore. I didn't connect Ющенко with the politician. It also took me 4 minutes to find the correct keys on my keyboard typing his name.

indienick · 07-09-2006, 11:09 AM

oddly enough, I've never actually watched CSPAN...I only follow the political shtuff by reading the Ukrainian newspapers my grandparents get...go figure.

so, as far as I've found, there's ncurses for C/C++, Perl, and Python...anything for any shell scripting languages (preferrably KSH)?

jschiwal · 07-11-2006, 06:05 AM

Everything I've seen in shells is where the ncurses library is used in a compiled c program that is called in a shell script.

gnashley · 07-11-2006, 01:57 PM

Usually one uses 'dialog' to access the ncurses libs from shell.

indienick · 07-11-2006, 02:56 PM

thanks for the reply gnashly.

That's pretty much what I'm looking for. Thanks a bunch.