[Gambas-user] text interface apps

[Rob]

On Wednesday 12 August 2009 12:30 pm, Rolf-Werner Eilert wrote:
> And yes: I don't think the special "graphical characters" like in DOS
> (ASCII > 128) exist on a Linux terminal, do they? So it would be
> somewhat difficult to build "mask" like things. Though Midnight
> Commander can do this, how does it handle this? Maybe special fonts for
> terminal output? And top has lines, too...

The ANSI extensions to ASCII include all those graphical characters (and 
that's how they did them in DOS as well.)  Most modern terminal types 
support ANSI, but you can't count on the user's font supporting them.  I 
assume this is why some Linux console programs use +------+ to make lines 
and corners instead of those box characters.

The way to do this, I think, would be to make a Gambas component that 
implements as much of gb.form as possible using the ncurses library.  
ncurses is lower level than gtk or Qt though (I'm not sure it even manages 
its own event loop), so it would be a big project.  But Mono has it (see 
MonoCurses) so it's certainly possible.

I seem to remember a Gtk-like toolkit that sat on top of ncurses, so maybe 
if that's still being developed it would be an option.  Googling got me to 
mytui, NDK++ and CDK, which are ncurses-based widget sets, but they haven't 
been updated in a few years.  Then again, maybe someone trying to develop a 
Gambas component could use that code as a starting point.

Rob