[Coco] What Is curses?

[William Schaub]

Mark McDougall wrote:
> James Dessart wrote:
>
>> It makes it easier to write software with a console interface.
>
> I used it for one project in the past, and I'd suggest that the above 
> statement is true only for _some_ definitions of the word "easier" ;)
>
> Personally, I thought it was ghastly. I'll never use it again.
>
> Regards,
>
Basically it allows you to write a character based terminal application 
that takes advantage of advanced terminal features like character 
attributes, cursor movement and soforth. and make it run on more than 
one terminal. (it abstracts on top of a database describing different 
terminals and the terminal specific control codes for each terminal in 
the database)

It also allows you to keep track of where the cursor is and address 
different areas of the screen etc.  pretty much all UNIX based terminal 
applications use some form of the curses library (or something very 
similar to curses, in the case of the slrn news reader and a few other 
applications)

hope this makes things more clear. In either case there is a ton of 
applications that depend on curses out there and porting them to OS9 
would require a mostly working curses library. preferably one that 
didn't just understand the OS9 terminal escapes. (because if you have a 
serial port you might want to hook up a VT100 or VT220 to it as an extra 
login terminal, or access OS9 from a PC running a terminal emulator 
software for example)


I actually use an old IBM 3151 terminal every time I go home for 
Christmas I hook it into my Linux laptop to get an extra head and a much 
superior (Model M style clicky keyboard) keyboard for when I have to do 
any real work. I actually find editing source on the green screen 
terminal easier and I can use the graphical screen to display reference 
material on the web etc.  its a bit archaic but I don't think I will 
ever throw out any of my terminals.  being able to use one with the coco 
would be rather nice.