Ncurses Library On Mac

 

The ncurses library permits manipulation of data structures, called windows, which can be thought of as two-dimensional arrays of charac- ters representing all or part of a CRT screen. A default window called stdscr, which is the size of the terminal screen, is supplied. Others may be created with newwin. Curses.ncursesversion¶ A named tuple containing the three components of the ncurses library version: major, minor, and patch. All values are integers. The components can also be accessed by name, so curses.ncursesversion0 is equivalent to curses.ncursesversion.major and so on. Availability: if the ncurses library is used.

I have been trying to write a relatively simple command line application which makes use of various ncurses functions. In the process I found that the copy of curses that came installed on OS X was lacking in many features. So I downloaded and installed (successfully) ncurses 5.2. Now whenever I try to compile my program, I get various undefined symbols errors (such as _move and _refresh), depending on what curses functions I use. I know it isn't a problem with my program, because it compiles fine using the built-in curses library. Not to mention that I get the errors even if I write a simple program with nothing but a single curses command, such as refresh(); or move(5,5); Does anyone have any idea as to what I can do about this or where I can go to get help? Thanks!
ncurses
Developer(s)GNU Project
Initial release1993; 27 years ago
Stable release
6.2 / 12 February 2020; 10 months ago
Repository
Written inC
Operating systemPOSIX
TypeWidget toolkit
LicenseX11 License[1]
Websiteinvisible-island.net/ncurses/

ncurses (new curses) is a programming library providing an application programming interface (API) that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces in a terminal-independent manner. It is a toolkit for developing 'GUI-like' application software that runs under a terminal emulator. It also optimizes screen changes, in order to reduce the latency experienced when using remote shells.

There are bindings for ncurses in a variety of programming languages, including Ada,[2]Python,[3]Gambas,[4]Ruby,[5]PHP,[6]JavaScript,[7] and Perl.[8]

History[edit]

As the new version, ncurses is a free-software emulation of the System V Release 4.0 (SVr4) curses, which was itself an enhancement over the discontinued 4.4 BSD curses.[9] The XSI Curses standard issued by X/Open is explicitly and closely modeled on System V.

curses[edit]

The first curses library was developed at the University of California at Berkeley, for a BSD operating system, around 1980 to support Rogue, a text-based adventure game. It originally used the termcap library, which was used in other programs, such as the vi editor.[9]

The success of the BSD curses library prompted Bell Labs to release an enhanced curses library in their System V Release 2 Unix systems. This library was more powerful and instead of using termcap, it used terminfo. However, due to AT&T policy regarding source-code distribution, this improved curses library did not have much acceptance in the BSD community.[9]

pcurses[edit]

Around 1982, Pavel Curtis started work on a freeware clone of the Bell Labs curses, named pcurses, which was maintained by various people through 1986.[10]

ncurses[edit]

The pcurses library was further improved when Zeyd Ben-Halim took over the development effort in late 1991.[9][10][11] The new library was released as ncurses in November 1993, with version 1.8.1 as the first major release. Subsequent work, through version 1.8.8 (M1995), was driven by Eric S. Raymond, who added the form and menu libraries written by Juergen Pfeifer.[12] Since 1996, it has been maintained by Thomas E. Dickey.[10]

Most ncurses calls can be easily ported to the old curses. System V curses implementations can support BSD curses programs with just a recompilation.[13] However, a few areas are problematic, such as handling terminal resizing, since no counterpart exists in the old curses.

Terminal database[edit]

Ncurses can use either terminfo (with extensible data) or termcap. Other implementations of curses generally use terminfo; a minority use termcap. Few (mytinfo was an older exception[14]) use both.

Library

Ncurses Library On Mac Mojave

License[edit]

Ncurses is a part of the GNU Project. It is one of the few GNU files not distributed under the GNU GPL or LGPL; it is distributed under a permissive free software licence, similar to the MIT License.[15] This is due to the agreement made with the Free Software Foundation at the time the developers assigned their copyright.

When the agreement was made to pass on the rights to the FSF, there was a clause that stated:[15]

The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Package, or of any work 'based on the Package', that takes place under the control of the Foundation or its agents or assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same terms.

According to the maintainer Thomas E. Dickey, this precludes relicensing to the GPL in any version, since it would place restrictions on the programs that will be able to link to the libraries.[15]

Programs using ncurses[edit]

There are hundreds of programs which use ncurses.[16][17] Some, such as GNU Screen and w3m, use only the termcap interface and perform screen management themselves. Others, such as GNU Midnight Commander and YaST, use the curses programming interface.

See also[edit]

  • conio.h – A C header file used in MS-DOS compilers to create text user interfaces
  • SMG$ – The screen-management library available under OpenVMS

References[edit]

Ncurses Library Mac

  1. ^'NCURSES — Licensing'. Retrieved July 9, 2013.
  2. ^Ada95 Binding for ncurses
  3. ^Curses Programming with Python - Python documentation
  4. ^gb.ncurses - Gambas Wiki
  5. ^ncurses Ruby - RubyGems.org
  6. ^Ncurses functions - PHP Manual
  7. ^nc plugin: ncurses bindings for SpiderApe
  8. ^Curses::UI - A curses based OO user interface framework
  9. ^ abcdEric S. Raymond (September 1995). 'ncurses: Portable Screen-Handling for Linux'. Linux Journal.
  10. ^ abcThomas E. Dickey (December 1996). 'NCURSES - New Curses'.
  11. ^The README file in ncurses 1.8.1 states 'v0.1 July 31, 1992' and 'v1.8.1 November 5, 1993', which agrees with the NEWS (changelog) file
  12. ^NCURSES - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Who wrote NCURSES?
  13. ^A Hacker's Guide to Ncurses Internals
  14. ^Sydney S. Weinstein (April 1993). 'On the Networks'. C/C++ Users Journal. Archived from the original on 2014-08-11. Retrieved 2017-09-15.
  15. ^ abcNCURSES - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Is it GPL'd?
  16. ^'Search results: +ncurses on freshmeat.net'. Archived from the original on February 18, 2012. Retrieved 2013-05-10.
  17. ^'Projects tagged 'ncurses''. ohloh.

External links[edit]

  • Official website

Ncurses Library On Mac Catalina

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