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Posted by Guy Lecky-Thompson Nov 24, 2006 |
You'd have thought it would be reasonably easy to supply curses emulation under DOS, wouldn't you. Surprise!! It's not.
Ok, so what's curses? It's a nice library added to Unix (Linux, Minix & HP-UX for all I know) that enables you to play with the mouse and screen. Make windows, change the color of text, that kind of thing.
In BASIC days, it used to be really easy, but it seems that the more powerful a system becomes, the harder it is to actually program it. Hence, adding colored text, windows and mouse support to plain old command line Unix becomes a complex interaction between libararies, direct hardware manipulation, and so on.
Which means that porting to DOS is easy for those who know how, but has resulted in something that I persoanlly find quite hard to fathom. For all of you wanting to follow the examples in the Understanding Unix Curses article you'll need to find a curses library for your compiler.
I'll post the ones I find as comments below, but feel free to add your own.
In the mentime, happy cursing!