I have the impression that the original author used as just enough of ncurses to be able to replace it by termcap/terminfo. The reason is that I see the programs creating every window separately and writing to line-column coordinates within that space without using the form or panel features of ncurses.
I am not an ncurses expert, but my suspicion is that we have a choice to either keep supporting terminfo without ncurses like the programs do now, or switch more fully to ncurses and use the features it offers. Ncurses would then be mandatory and we would lose a lot of the #ifdef-#endif combinations.
EDIT: I need to make that more precise. NCurses distributes "sister" libraries for panels, forms and menus. Apparantly there is a package called dialog (haven't looked into that one yet). The sister libraries make programmer life easier, that is the intention. Still the issue remains what to do. Even if we do not use the sister libraries we could use windows in stead of rolling our own, like Fred Kruse has done.
This is not an issue we need to decide now. Just wanted it noted for future reference. We can put it aside for now.
gbonnema
commented
7 years ago
Hi Alessandro,
I have the impression that the original author used as just enough of ncurses to be able to replace it by termcap/terminfo. The reason is that I see the programs creating every window separately and writing to line-column coordinates within that space without using the form or panel features of ncurses.
I am not an ncurses expert, but my suspicion is that we have a choice to either keep supporting terminfo without ncurses like the programs do now, or switch more fully to ncurses and use the features it offers. Ncurses would then be mandatory and we would lose a lot of the #ifdef-#endif combinations.
EDIT: I need to make that more precise. NCurses distributes "sister" libraries for panels, forms and menus. Apparantly there is a package called dialog (haven't looked into that one yet). The sister libraries make programmer life easier, that is the intention. Still the issue remains what to do. Even if we do not use the sister libraries we could use windows in stead of rolling our own, like Fred Kruse has done.
This is not an issue we need to decide now. Just wanted it noted for future reference. We can put it aside for now.